Choice is certainly under-rated and we take it for granted in the Western world.

Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated. Consumer choice may have even been a major driver in taking down centrally planned economies.

Boris Yeltsin while visiting a supermarket in Houston:

> Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”

About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.

In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia. You can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops.

“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.” [0]

[0] http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-...

> Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated.

Supermarket choice is often largely the illusion of choice -- the same product (substantively, and often literally, made in the same facility to the same specifications) in different packaging

Even if you reduced every variant of an item in a supermarket from the 80s down to its essence, a supermarket would still cream a Soviet-era food market in selection, and most especially, reliability. I tried to find a "fair" picture of a Soviet-era market for you to see in Google images, but, all I could find were pictures of empty shelves. While this is not 100% representative, it does say something real.

If it is an "illusion", it's still built on a solid base of real choice that centralized government management completely failed to produce.

No one is really knocking substantive choice, just the fake illusory choice such as the toothpaste manufacturer with 15 lines of effectively identical paste.

Really? Here is the subtitle of the linked article:

> From jeans to dating partners and TV subscriptions to schools, we think the more choices we have the better. But too many options create anxiety and leave us less satisfied. Could one answer lie in a return to the state monopolies of old?

Perception is reality. I'm not a psychologist but if someone is fooling themselves into thinking they're consuming a better product, so much so that they actually pay a premium for that product, who are you to say that it's not "substantially" better? The connection many people have in consumption is very personal. Imagine someone telling you their spouse is better than your own in all objective criteria.

I've heard (although can't verify) that products were differentiated in the Soviet Union by where they were made. So essentially, the consumer would have a choice of "factory 1 shampoo", "factory 2 shampoo" and so on. Meaningful? Sure, but seems silly to me.

As for differentiation of goods in Soviet Union it went as: - made in USSR: hard to buy - made in USSR for export: takes a bribe to buy - made in Soviet block countries (DDR, Czechoslovakia): requires bribe and connections - made in Western countries: you better be high-profile member of a communist party

Indeed. Try finding food containing little or no refined sugar in a regular supermarket. Good luck :)

This doesn't make a lot of sense as a critique of choice. If you don't like the options available in a regular supermarket, you can go up one level and visit higher-end supermarkets, or even smaller specialty stores instead of chains.

Now, it is true that it requires more effort to find the foods you're interested in. That's because most people aren't interested in the same foods you are. There's no way to "fix" this problem beyond heavy-handed government intervention, and in a socialist society I can guarantee you that -- unless the Supreme Leader is also keen on foods without refined sugar -- you're going to find it even harder to locate anything which isn't preferred by the mass market.

Well, I can shop at Whole Foods instead of at Safeway. Choice isn't just what exists inside one store.

The same applies to General Motors' cars - same lousy styling and reliability in different packaging (sub-brands) :-).

To add a bit of a counter-point, seeing as I found this paragraph recently, here's a section from "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis. It's discussing the experience of Sergey Aleynikov, the Goldman Sachs hacker that later got sued, when coming to America:

> He arrived in New York city in 1990 and moved into a dorm room at the 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, a sort of Jewish YMCA. Two things shocked him about his new home: the diversity of the people on the streets and the fantastic range of foods in the grocery stores. He took photographs of the rows and rows of sausages in Manhattan and mailed them to his mother in Moscow. "I'd never seen so many sausages," he says. But once he'd marveled at the American cornucopia, he stepped back from it all and wondered just how necessary all of this food was.

> [...]

> In the end he became a finicky vegetarian."

I would say he was just a product of his environment and unconsciously defended the system he was raised in. Many people are blinded to the detriments of their surroundings because it's all they know.

> Many people are blinded to the detriments of their surroundings because it's all they know.

Exactly same argument can be used against Western-style cornucopia-of-false-choices stores, or anything else at all for that matter.

That is quite correct. Makes it a solid argument.

I would say you're just blinded because that's the argument you were brought up with

America has great options for vegetarians. In a lot of languages there isn't even a native word for vegetarian, not to mention vegan.

The English word "vegetarian" was formed in 19th century from a Latin-via-French word combined with a Latin-via-French suffix. Not quite as Old English as "meat"...

From my memory, the term for 'vegetarian' prior to ~100 years ago was 'pythagorian'.

Or "peasant."

I am hoping to make those options more visible

> Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated.

And yet they were found to be price rigging in the UK.

Does that therefore prove that having lots of choices in a supermarket is bad?

No it doesn't prove it, it was just a remark.

I'm not sure I'd agree. Personally I don't find choice debilatating, but I know plenty of people who do - my girfriend finds it very difficult to make choices, and has to research things to the Nth degree to ensure she's not making a wrong one, and a lot of the kids I teach find options anxiety to be a real problem. However, when faced with an area where there is choice but I have little information (such as buying a given spice in Tesco and there are 3 seemingly equivalent choices) I have experienced this.

I'd agree about the tagging on of the Corbyn bit at the end - I don't think it has anything to do with the article - but I'm not sure that the high priced choice you cite is necessarily the same thing?

I also know plenty of people who find lack of choice debilitating. Ramanujan - an Indian living in the UK was debilitated by the absence of Idlis. (In the modern world, Tesco has him covered.) I'm certainly unhappy in northwest Delhi when I can't find a decent dosa, pasta or croissant [1].

Minorities exist, and some of them really need those choices that paralyze your girlfriend. I think a better solution is for your girlfriend to learn coping skills than for my ex-girlfriend to suffer with Indian shampoo that doesn't work for African hair.

[1] Or at least such things are 1.5 hours away in Khan market.

We should probably distinguish between range and choice here - between things that the consumer can see are not the same, and things where they can't see the difference.

Choosing from "croissant, bagel, loaf" is much easier than choosing from "white sandwich tin loaf A, white sandwich tin loaf B, white sandwich tin loaf C".

We should definitely distinguish between different consumers.

I personally have always drawn fine distinctions between different types of loaf. At one time I could barely tell the difference between naan and roti.

A friend of mine - who can easily distinguish between paratha, lecha paratha, kerala paratha and methi paratha - can barely tell the difference between croissant and loaf.

So what are you proposing? Taking away my artisinal whole grain sourdough loaf, or taking away her lecha paratha?

I'm not proposing anything specific, and I'm certainly not proposing "taking away" anything. Just noting that for sheer logistical reasons not every shop can stock every exact item, and more similar products are easier to substitute.

I assume you are referring to the mathmatician. It's odd because reading what you said makes me think I'd rather a diversity of product types, but I care less about having more than one of each type. Having said that, Tesco stock a Jamaican stout (Dragon), and for about a year, they didn't stock it. And it intrinsically annoyed me. They did replace with a like product after a while (Guiness version), but I didn't like that.

Which makes me aware that you can get fussy over different brands/tastes. Beer is a good example actually.

There was something that really bugged me about being offered the product and then having it withdrawn, it's replacement wasn't enough.

But this is not lack of choice. It's lack of availability. Wouldn't one good brand of pasta solve most of your pasta needs? Do you really feel like you'd still be unhappy unless you had 10 shapes of pasta each made from one of three different grains, each available from two or three different brands?

The fact that I don't eat fusilli very much doesn't mean that other people don't.

The thought experiment surrounding the removal of choice is not the removal of choices that other people make. It's the removal of your favorite choices, particularly if you are a minority.

> Most likely the reason Tesco is reducing choices is because stocking more SKUs is expensive

Many supermarket chains also charge producers for shelf space, so dropping products and cranking the rates charged for placement is a great revenue stream. Awful for the customer and for producers, of course.

The SKU cost is worth exploring the context that Tesco is facing massive pressure from the lower end of the market in Lidl and Aldi.

Separately it also allows for better bargaining power with the suppliers, fewer brands on the shelves = Tesco having greater competition between brands to get on the shelves.

And they have their own brands: a basic and a finest. Less choice may be a win for them.