Decisions, Decisions: Consumers Have Plenty
You want toothpaste, so you pause by the store display and ask yourself: cool mint or fresh mint? for smokers or nonsmokers? gel or paste? anti-stain? anti-tartar? anti-bleeding gums? baking soda? brightener? sparkles? stripes?
You need auto tires, and there’s lots to choose from: rain tires, snow tires or all-season? touring tires? performance tires? tires that run despite a flat? improve mileage? reduce noise? last long?
From toothpaste to tires, beer to brassieres, consumers face a wide range of choices. Many people like that. But many others admit to system overload. Bewildered and fatigued by a marketplace that exhorts them to choose, choose, choose, they throw in the 100% cotton, satin-appliqued towel.
“When you’re bombarded by a lot of stuff, you forget everything,” said Nelson Thall, director of research at the McLuhan Center for media sciences in Toronto. “We shut down.”
Even Consumer Reports magazine can’t check out all the peanut butters we might want to buy.
“It’s getting more complicated,” said John Lowe, director of market information for Yonkers, N.Y.-based Consumer Reports. “It’s happening in so many product categories.”
Shopper Ruth Wetzel looked at about ten 32-inch television sets in two stores in a suburb of Pittsburgh. She narrowed her preferred brand names to Magnavox and Zenith and rejected the picture-within-a-picture feature but had yet to decide whether to pay more for stereo sound hookups, a treble-bass knob and an extra tuner.
“You get confused,” she said. “I wish there were less and they were better.”
Carl Millner was trying to locate the Duncan Hines angel food cake mix.
After one false move, he found the right aisle. He looked at the Duncan Hines array of 14 cake mixes once, twice, three times. Finally, he leaned down and touched each box one at a time before convincing himself the angel food wasn’t there. Eventually, he found it a few feet over with the other angel food mixes.
“This has always bugged me a little bit,” said Millner, of Corapolis.
Tom O’Guinn, professor of advertising and business administration at the University of Illinois at Champaign, said the confusion is our own fault. “There are a multitude of products because we want them,” O’Guinn said.
He traced the first widening of consumer choice to the 1950s, when General Motors and Bell Telephone first offered cars and telephones that were not black.
But choices cost. Lowe of Consumer Reports said designing, producing, taking inventory and advertising all these products cost money. Who pays? The consumer.
Deborah D. Heisley, assistant professor of marketing at UCLA, said shoppers cope with the overwhelming number of choices by focusing on what they see as important.
Reene Zona, an employee, student and homemaker who’s short of time, efficiently screened out the competing brands of ricotta cheese at a Giant Eagle supermarket. She barely glanced at the Lamagna brand carton as she scooped it into her shopping cart.
“My mother-in-law’s used this for years,” Zona said.
She bought large eggs in the store brand’s cardboard carton, eschewing the Styrofoam for environmental reasons.
Procter & Gamble struck a small blow against mega-choice last fall when it introduced a new line of disposable diapers, Pampers Premium. Unlike its standard Pampers, the new product doesn’t come in separate versions for girls and boys.
“People are telling us they wanted us to keep the cost down, and that was one way we were able to do it,” P&G; spokesman Mark Leaf said.
Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore University, said that a surfeit of choice is part of our pepped-up, hyped-up era. But while giving us more freedom, it can leave us dissatisfied.
“You end up making choices convinced that there’s something better that you’ve missed,” Schwartz said.
He believes that affects the way we behave as friends and lovers: picky, picky, picky.
John Pracejus, a doctoral student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, gained a similar perspective by spending six months last year in Russia, where shoppers may spend hours in line to buy withered vegetables.
When he came home, he went to Kmart for a garden hose and was surprised by the bright lights and colorful packages. He looked at rubber hoses, soaker hoses and miniature fire hoses as well as the object of his desire, a cheap, plastic hose.
In Russia? “You would have had a choice of one,” Pracejus said.
But also in Russia, people spend more time with family and friends, he said. Russians were astonished that he might see one of his friends only once a year.
In this country, “it’s easy to become very comfortable with things and to begin thinking more about them and less about people,” Pracejus said.
