Too Many Choices

Usually I make my own hummous and make a rather nice chilli hummous by adding few drops of Tabasco to the mix. Smoked garlic hummous is nice too (my sister sends me parcels of smoked garlic from the Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight). Sometimes I run out of ingredients (shop near work stopped stocking Tahini paste so I can only get it when I go into town on a Saturday). To tide me over this week, I tried to buy hummous from Tesco. I could get any flavour except plain! They had hummous with roasted vegetables, red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, pesto (way too oily), olives, caramelised onions (yummers except for flatulence), butternut squash, rocket, lemon & coriander, oriental flavouring plus a plethora of salsas and sour-cream-based dips, but not a single pot of plain hummous. Not even organic plain hummous.

These days there is way too much choice. Faced with so many choices, many consumers are overwhelmed and don't buy anything. This was demonstrated as a "jam tasting". When faced with only a few choices, consumers often bought a pot of jam after tasting the options. When faced with a multitude of choices, consumers didn't buy any pots of jam.

Billy has recently been reading The Long Tail which looks at choices and minority markets. All this choice is mixed blessing - on the one hand it serves minority tastes, but on the other hand it overwhelms consumers. When designing software interfaces and menus, the rule was 7 +/- 2 options on a menu or screen. Too much choice confused the user (but some menus now have around 30 options, sigh).

Too much choice is also a contributing factor in obesity - rather than content themselves with one flavour and try something else on another day, many consumers gulp down multiple flavours each time. Ice cream used to be a choice of vanilla, strawberry, chocolate or raspberry ripple (green mint choc chip or rum-and-raisin if you went to a posh place). At most, you got a double scoop. Nowadays you can get tall, wide cones (or tubs) that accommodate 5 scoops piled up. Thorntons do around 8 flavours and a triple scoop option. Baskins Robbins do about 30 and tubs like small buckets.

It's the same with Millies Cookies. Why treat yourself to 1 or 2 cookies when you can buy them in 5s or 10s and it works out cheaper per cookie? Fine if you have 5 people, but I keep seeing people scoffing 5 cookies because (a) they don't have to choose just 1 or 2 flavours and (b) it works out cheaper (except it doesn't - it's cheaper to buy just one!)

I ended up buying aubergines, peppers, baby potatoes and small onions and roasting them with olive oil, freshly ground black pepper and some chilli seeds. They are yummers served cold with salad and a hot salsa. I also found some half-price pesto hummous - and yes, that yellow discount sticker influenced my choice.

Unreliable, Disorganised, Useless People Rant

A couple of weeks back, Billy and I had to stay indoors all afternoon because someone had booked to view the room at 1 pm. At 1:45 she phoned to say she'd just arrived at the station as there were delays on the tube. Fair enough, if she was stuck underground she couldn't phone earlier. Billy gave her directions from the station and landmarks (a pub) and the address. It's about 10-15 mins walk (I've done the walk often enough).

We waited ... and waited ... and waited ....

At 2:30 she phoned to say she was standing outside the house (the right house number) but there wasn't a "Flat D". We were looking out the window and there was no-one outside, which meant she wasn't at the address Billy had given her. He gave her more directions and we waited.

... and waited ... and waited ....

At 3 p.m. he tried phoning and got no signal, so it seemed the very disorganised person had got back on the tube. So we went out.

So where did she end up?

• Maybe she can't tell left from right and walked completely the wrong way after leaving the single exit of the tube station.
  
• Maybe she was at the wrong tube station.


• Maybe she ended up at the wrong pub (there are 2 pubs with "Queen" in the name).


• Maybe she saw the first road called a "Grove" and went down there instead of going to the road Billy told her.


• Maybe she was sat at home watching telly and pretending to be lost as an excuse for not bothering.

The commiseration is that someone so disorganised she can't follow clear instructions (everyone else, including me, has been able to find it) or print out a map is probably too disorganised to pay bills on time. It was, however, very frustrating as we spent 2 hours unable to go out or indulge in friskiness.

Anyway, we did eventually go out and we wandered round the huge Paperchase on Tottenham Court Road - 3 floors of exotic and mundane paper ranging from schooldays "sugar paper" to gossamer-thin Japanese paper, pretty shiny stationery supplies and, for some reason, handbags. Billy prefers Paperchase (frivolous) to Ryman (functional).