Less is More?

Is there ever such a thing as too many choices? As consumers, if we're faced with too many dishes on the restaurant menu, too many brands of toothpaste on the supermarket shelf, or too many streaming shows on TV, the choice overload paralyzes and overwhelms us - often leaving us dissatisfied with our decisions. Choice overload has even achieved a cultural influence that is rare for scientific ideas, earning mention in sources as varied as long-running TV drama Grey's Anatomy and Torrey Peters's bestselling novel Detransition, Baby.

In 2000, psychologists Sheena Lyengar and Mark Lepper published a study that showed limited selection is better for the shopper. In their experiment, Lyengar and Lepper found consumers were 10 times more likely to purchase jam on display when the number of jams available was cut down from 24 to 6, even though they were more likely to stop at the display offering more selection. Subsequent studies have confirmed this phenomenon: that fewer choices, not lots of variety, actually encourage shoppers to buy more.

Think about Coca-Cola: at one point they had nearly 400 drink offerings. In an effort to reduce costs and boost profits, they cut their offerings almost in half. Some of the drinks they have discontinued include Tab, Zico coconut water, Diet Coke Feisty Cherry, and Odwalla juices. Other companies and stores are thinking along those same lines. Take Stew Leonard's (a supermarket chain in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey) for example. In 2019, they offered 49 different cereal flavors or types; now they only offer 24. Dollar General, based in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, used to stock up to six different types of mayonnaise, but is now planning on dropping a couple of them. Do the stores think consumers will complain or notice anything has changed? In December, Todd J. Vasos, CEO of Dollar General, said, "The consumer is not going to know the difference. Actually, it's going to make her life a little simpler when she goes to the shelf."

And this trend has hit more than just the food and beverage companies and stores. Under its new CEO Tom Kingsbury, Kohl's has been cutting back on the colors and variations of sweaters, jeans and other items, while sending their buyers into the New York market more frequently to bring in fresh trendy merchandise. Some customers like the changes so far. "It's pretty organized," said Kimberly Ribeiro, 30, who was at the Kohl's store on a recent Friday. "If it's not so cluttered, then you don't get overwhelmed."

Even in the auto world, shoppers are finding fewer choices. Both General Motors and Ford have touted that they are limiting the number of option combinations customers can get on their vehicles to reduce manufacturing and purchasing complexity. That's a reversal from a few years ago when there was an explosion of choices, encouraged in part by online shopping that paid no mind to space constraints. But that didn't always lead to increased sales, so companies started pruning selections a year or two before the pandemic. Then during the pandemic, the pruning only accelerated, with companies focusing on necessities as they wrestled with supply chain clogs.

Still, it's a balancing act for retailers. David Berliner, who leads the business restructuring and turnaround practice at BDO, noted, "You want to make these cuts so they're not even aware of it, and you want the store to still look full. If you do it too much, you might scare some [customers] away."

Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, wrote, "Choice is good for us, but its relationship to satisfaction appears to be more complicated than we had assumed. Psychologists and business academics alike have largely ignored another outcome of choice: more of it requires increased time and effort and can lead to anxiety, regret, excessively high expectations, and self-blame if the choices don't work out. Eventually, each new option makes us feel worse off than we did before." So maybe less really is more!