When you need to make a decision, having more choices isn’t necessarily better: what really matters is ending up with a good result. Greenfield cites an old Burger King advert: “Choices don’t mean a thing when there’s nothing good to choose.”
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The increasing amount of choice we have now allows us to lead lives that are objectively better, but subjectively worse than before. This thought-provoking book by Barry Schwartz tries to show why the increasing amount of choice in our lives isn’t making us happier — in fact, it’s making us less happy. Fortunately, he also describes solutions to allow us to manage the negative effects of choice.
I tend to agree with him in general. Here’s a rather trivial example of a way I have tried to avoid the problem. When confronted with a restaurant menu, I try to read down the menu until I find something that sounds good to me. Then I stop, and order that thing. There are some restaurants I have been to several times where I have never read to the end of the menu, because I know that I will end up agonising over my choice and thinking I should have chosen something else anyway.
Suppose there are two roads between two points. One road is free to use, the other has a toll. The one with the toll will, of course, be less crowded. So road users can travel for free, or they can pay extra to get there quicker.
The interesting thing is that this works regardless of the other differences between the roads. The toll road might actually be wider or narrower, longer or shorter than the free one. But as long as the roads are sufficiently busy, the journey will always be quicker on the toll road.
I was thinking about applying this idea to supermarket queues. Supermarkets could set aside one or two checkout lanes that have a charge of $1 to use. If you’re in a hurry, you can pay the extra money; the queue will always be shorter.
