Choices, choices...

I'm paging through this month's edition of THE ECONOMIST--always in search of material to stuff into the Breadbin, you understand--and lo and behold, there's a stub of an article about razor blades. Damned if I wasn't pontificating about this very topic not all that long ago.
How many blades do we need? The cutting edge, so to speak, is five: the Gillette Fusion. I'm still two iterations behind, and quite happy with my trusty Mach3 (not even the Turbo edition). I could be wrong, but I tend to think that anything more than three blades is an unnecessary marketing ploy--a pile of Schick.
(The article suggests that razor evolution is following a variant of Moore's Law (the observation that computer chips double in power every eighteen months), and that, possibly, "blade hyperdrive will be reached in the next few years and those who choose not to sport beards might be advised to start exercising their shaving arms now.")
This got me to musing about product diversity. One complaint I am hearing with increasing frequency is that there are simply too many products on the market. At least once a week, somebody bemoans the vast amount of choice available in, say, yogurt. Oddly enough, it's usually an elderly somebody. I thought people became more set in their ways as they aged: certainly I'm following that pattern...I search out my brand, ignoring everything else like so much visual chaff, and once I've locked on to the target, I grab it and get the hell out.
But many of our customers are confused by the variety of yogurt arrayed before them. They stand immobile, with a deer-in-the-headlights look on their faces as they mull choices: sugar, aspartame, or Splenda? What level of milk fat? Stirred or fruit-on-the-bottom? Should they get the one with marine omega-3, or is dairy omega-3 fine? Let's consider bacteria: bifidus, bifidobacterium BL, L acidophilus? Size: cup, tub, or multipack, and if the latter, what flavour assortment and how many of each flavour? Does price point enter into it at all? Brand loyalty?

Maybe these people have a point. Choice is usually a good thing, but too much choice can be overwhelming. And yet companies are forever coming out with new products--or what they insist on calling "new and improved". I'm still waiting to see something "new and...slightly worse". And the sheep are buying. They must be, or we wouldn't see this explosion of endless variety.
The grocery stores themselves are multiplying like weeds. When I came to this city in 1990, you had a simple choice if you wanted a supermarket over twenty thousand square feet. It was Zehrs, Dutch Boy, or starve to death. Now we have five Sobeys, seven Zehrs, three Price Choppers, four Food Basics, a Valu-Mart, a Real Canadian Wholesale Club, and--oh yeah, can't forget the two Wal-Marts, even though their selection is pitiful. They do, after all, set the staple prices in this city...if they decide they're going to lose seventy cents on every pound of butter they sell, we're all obligated to follow along. Sigh.
From two chains and ten stores to seven chains and more than twenty. The population hasn't shot up that much in sixteen years.
This is great for the consumer: more choice in grocers equals different loss leaders on every week. But as a lowly peon in the industry, I really have to question the motive behind all this competition. It's getting damned hard to attract and keep customers in a world where there's always something new just down the street. Even more daunting is the proposition of making money, which is, after all, the goal of any business.
Choice seems to be the word of the millennium so far. Five hundred television channels (and still nothing on...) Soon, I predict, TV networks will be obsolete and people will simply choose whatever show they want, whenever they want it.
Umpty dozen varieties of soy milk, a product that didn't even exist twenty years ago and yet one that it seems people are incapable of living without now. (They all taste like crap! People! Wake up! Blecccch!) We used to get by with Visa and Chargex--Amex was always around if you were rich, of course. Now you can walk into virtually any retailer and get a branded credit card.
Then there's choice taken to ridiculous heights: just try to walk into Starbucks and order "a coffee".

If the choice were mine, I'd choose simplicity...