More is less?
A friend of mine was complaining about having too many choices for lunch. Go to a salad bar, and you have to make ten decisions about the ingredients of your salad. Sure, you can get close to your perfect custom-made salad, but only at a significant cognitive/transaction cost.
Yet, we do not see many ‘Soviet’ salad bars offering only two or three pre-set choices. Instead we seem to see the opposite — increasing tendency towards more choices (Subway; a million different kinds of coffee).
I wonder if this is because people’s tastes in terms of salad are sufficiently different that any transaction cost savings of offering fewer choices are swamped by the dissatisfaction of getting something that’s too far away from your ideal preference?
2 Comments
It is usually a decision one only has to make once if you have a stable ordering of preferences. Bars and buffets rapidly become boring because we end up making largely the same choices over and over.
Subway or such a salad bar has a different business model than a coffee shop with “a million different kinds of coffee”. A customer going to Subway has to go through the whole process - choose your bread, veggie, meat, etc etc to have a sandwich; so the decision making is linear. Every single stage is vital for the final product – you don’t choose your bread, you don’t have a sandwich.
However, in the case of “a million different kinds of coffee”, a customer will be presented by a million choices but he/she would only need to choose one, making one decision. I would call it a tree-shape decision making – it’s not necessary to go through the entire menu of a million kinds of coffee.
Imagine you going to a coffee shop and are asked to pick a barrister to serve you, choose the brand and the type of your coffee beans, decide on how it will be grinded, make a choice of the milk type (soy, slim), select a coffee mug that is in your favorite colour… umm… going to a coffee shop right in the middle of the CBD on a weekday, I probably just want a coffee. Make sense?