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