Hark back to those days, not so long ago, when we had just the choice of the Ambassador car or the Premier Padmini if you were shopping for a car. Today, the Indian consumer is spoilt for choice - there are more car brands and models than one can count and on TV there are a thousand channels to choose from! Is this supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing? Most of us have grown up hoping for more to choose from because we were always up against a limited range to choose from. When we traveled overseas we always were a bit flummoxed at the 200 varieties of bread in the London supermarket. I know I always wondered how people made up their minds when such a huge choice existed! As a kid in London I would simply ignore the whole range of breads and go simply for the Mother's Pride loaf of bread because I thought it would boggle the mind if I had to actually evaluate all those options before deciding on the bread of my choice!
So we come to the same question - is large choice a good thing or a bad thing? It seems one intrepid sardarni from the US decided to check this out - Sheena Sethi Iyengar a clinically unsighted psychology Professor set up these two tables at the entrance to a major supermarket and on one table she had 6 different jams to choose from and on the other she had 30 different jams to choose from. Of the 600 people who were exposed to the two tables she discovered that more people purchased from the table with fewer choices but more people visited the table with more choices!! Taking this one step further she evaluated people's level of satisfaction when exposed to choice and discovered that people exposed to more choice tended to be less satisfied with their purchase than the ones' who were exposed to less choice! So can we conclude that 'more choice is not necessarily' such a good idea? Well, this amazing lady has written a book on this subject and I'm about to launch into reading it - hopefully we'll find out about if more choice is good or bad when I'm through with the book. Until then I'd like some of you who read this blog to tell me what you think about the issue of choice!
I'm off to catch a train for Tuticorin in a moment - am headed off to Pearl city to attend my school friend Thamilarasu's daughter's wedding. There is going to be a large number of old buddies from school and I'm getting that excited feeling about meeting them.
