Choice: A consumer's nightmare.

Don’t get me wrong, I am pro-choice. What I am annoyed with, is having too many choices to pick from. Choice, in a consumeristic world, is particularly painful.

I’ve observed that I’m usually super satisfied when I have fewer choices. Here’s why.

• I walk into a supermarket — aisles filled with 60 varieties of cereal, 10 varieties of organic wheat, decision making gets awfully irritating. I just need wheat, the normal kind.
• Starbucks serves almost 90,000 variations of coffee. Boy, my headaches with long menus and add ons. Why does one need 90,000 choices to pick from?
• I don’t need 99 varieties of dosa (Indian pancake) in the name of opportunity cost or customer satisfaction.
• Don’t get me started with soy milk, oat milk, almond milk, cashew milk, hemp milk, rice milk and quinoa milk. The world was functioning pretty well without overwhelming choices.
• Dating — 600 men to choose from? How am I supposed to do that? After 5 swipes, everyone looks the same and writes the same thing differently.

From a consumer's perspective, an assortment of choices gives way to a lot of expectations and a lot of expectation leads to less satisfaction. Either the consumer needs to lower their expectations or companies need to cut down their category expansion. Consumerism desperately needs some Marie Kondo thinking. Maybe, sometimes, less is more.