Sometimes my head hurts at the end of the day from all of the decisions I have to make. Not the decisions at work, that”s all an accepted part of the job. It”s when I go to the grocery store, the fast food restaurant, or turn on the television or Sirius radio that I feel the tension mount. I”m a child of the ?50s.
Choices were much more limited when I was growing up. For potato chips it was plain, wavy or barbeque. There were only a few types of cereals. I checked the other day. Do you realize there are nine different varieties of Cheerios? In my formative years, we had three TV channels to choose from and, of course, no way to plug in a movie, if we didn”t like what was on those three channels.
A number of weeks ago, fellow Rotarian John Norcio, owner of the Lakeport McDonald”s, gave a presentation at Rotary about McDonald”s and his history with the company. One of the things that stuck in my mind was how, in the fast food chain”s early days; their menu only contained a few items.
You could have a hamburger, fries, soda or a shake. These days, with all of the competition, the fast food restaurant chains seem to be in constant competition to see who can introduce the next hot selling new item.
Mostly, I think it is good to have more options today than we had 50 years ago when I was a youngster. I do have some concerns about the impacts it has brought about, though. For one, does having more choices cause consumer costs to increase? It”s obvious that it does in some areas. Television was free when I was a kid.
Nowadays, we pay either a cable company or a satellite dish company a hefty monthly amount to have hundreds of options. Logic tells me that to have multiple varieties of products, like cereals and chips, the expense has to go up, due to smaller production runs and additional packaging costs.
I am surprised that the grocery stores can find enough shelf space to hold all of the products that are being marketed to the public. In fact, I don”t believe they do. There have been a number of cases in which my interest was piqued by the advertising about a product, only to not be able to find it when I went shopping. There are just too many products on the market to think that every store can stock them all.
Now, I have read that all of the choices that we, the consuming public, are presented with may be leading us to mental exhaustion.
In a study conducted by Kathleen D. Vohs, PhD, from the University of Minnesota, it was discovered that making more choices has a negative impact on the human mind. According to the study, “Maintaining one”s focus while trying to solve problems or completing an unpleasant task was much harder for those who had made choices, compared to those who had not.”
It didn”t make any difference if the study participants were in a classroom setting, a laboratory or at the shopping mall. Dr. Vohs concluded, “Making choices can be difficult and taxing, and there is a personal price to choosing.”
I would never want to return to the days of having extremely limited choices for consumer products and entertainment. One does get used to having greater options available and it would be difficult to go back to the simplicity of the 1950s.
Perhaps, we have passed some type of saturation point, though, where the constant addition of more selection options only serves to add to the complexity of our lives and even burdens us with greater mental fatigue. Most companies discontinue their weakest selling products.
Maybe the threshold for those cuts needs to be lowered, which would help decrease company expenses and ease the impact of option overload.
Gary Dickson is the publisher of the Record-Bee. He can be reached at gdickson@record-bee.com or called direct at 263-5636 ext. 24.
