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Americans Have More Choice - And A Harder Time Choosing

The Associated Press

Even customers who love Galco's Pop Stop in Los Angeles and its 500 sodas to choose from sometimes say the experience is overwhelming.

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The Associated Press

Published: August 10, 2008

LOS ANGELES - On blistering days in Los Angeles, drive northwest on the 110, exit at Highland Park and pull into a roadside grocery called Galco's. Then walk in and say, "I'm thirsty. Can you point me to the soda-pop aisle?"

This question may get you laughed out of the place. Because at Galco's, the soda pop is in almost every aisle. The place is a soft-drink nirvana containing 500 varieties of fizzy beverage from all corners of the planet.

The choice is yours, if you can handle it. The store, now known as Galco's Soda Pop Stop, is an exuberant explosion of the vaunted notion of freedom of choice, one of the ideals that supposedly makes America what it is.

It is wonderful. It is also intimidating. And in an election year, it's something the next president needs to understand.

The two-century focus on what America's founding fathers called "the pursuit of happiness" - coupled with the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century and the rise of consumerism in the 20th - has birthed a landscape of options as dizzying as it is liberating. Bed and Bath, it turns out, aren't nearly enough. These days, we're much more concerned with Beyond.

John Nese, who built Galco's into a promised land of sugary beverages, has thought a lot about choice in America. He offers two assessments.

The first: "People want choices. People want the opportunity to make their own decisions."

The second: "They come in and they look and they go, 'We're overwhelmed. We don't know what to buy.'"

The notion transcends simple consumerism. It also is the dilemma facing whoever wins November's election. With options beyond our great-grandparents' dreams, is freedom of unlimited choice really a freedom at all?

In a universe of unprecedented static, how can an American leader lead?

Driven To Distraction

Mermaid Treasure looks just like Blue Jewel. Waterscape and Cool Dusk could be identical twins. And try distinguishing Seven Seas and Southern Evening from 10 paces away.

At the Home Depot in Gibsonia, Pa., no fewer than 372 shades of blue paint are available, not counting the many blue-greens and blue-purples also offered in a section of swatches nearly as long as the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate.

This cross-section of American choice illuminates the multiple levels of decision-making required to negotiate today's consumer landscape, in this case before the painting even begins:

•Which store? There are four paint dealers within a mile of the Gibsonia Home Depot and at least 13 more within a 10-mile radius.

•Which brand? There are at least five to choose from.

•Which consistency? Pick from matte, eggshell, satin, semi-gloss and gloss.

•Which color group? Basic colors like blue, red and green are mere gateways to the real color choice.

•Which shade? Time to negotiate the hundreds of names that sound like either ice-cream flavors (Lavender Ice, Cloudberry) or small coastal communities (Little Pond, Wickford Bay).

That's more than a million ways to paint a door. And as powerful as the human brain is, its bandwidth is ultimately limited. By focusing on smaller choices, by continuously sifting through the categories and subcategories of things like color preference and Google results and spam, could it be that our multiple options are controlling rather than liberating us?

"Since Reagan, the ideology in the United States has been that choice is good and more choice is better. And to the extent that you can give people more choice in every area of life, you are improving their well-being," says Barry Schwartz, author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less."

But "nobody has the time or the expertise to make informed choices about everything," Schwartz says. "When options are presented, people have a tough time just ignoring them."

"It's wonderful that we can sit down in our living room and order 20,000 things. In a superficial way, we are more informed than people used to be. But it's hard to get our attention, and I don't see any way of turning that around," says Edward C. Rosenthal, author of "The Era of Choice: The Ability to Choose and Its Transformation of Contemporary Life."

Today, anyone who questions unfettered choice risks being accused of condescension and, worse, ignorance of market forces.

This is the landscape an American leader faces. The option becomes, "Follow me - unless you have something more interesting going on."

And accurately or not, today's citizens often think that they do.

Leading Through Static

"The only way we're going to solve our problems in this country is if all of us come together," Barack Obama said this month. Weeks earlier, John McCain said that "we are fellow Americans, and that shared distinction means more to me than any other association."

Unity is big in 2008. It means more voters. But can we come together? These days, beyond Sept. 11 or Katrina or rising gas prices, what exactly is that "shared distinction" we like to think unites us?

To inspire voters, campaigns use strategies such as microtargeting - mining data and finding voters' preferences, then customizing the message for each. But when candidate becomes president and prospective voter becomes mere citizen, those intricate techniques melt away.

What's a leader to do? Christine Riordan, a leadership expert at the University of Denver, prescribes simplicity.

Just as paying attention to a leader is a consumer choice, Riordan says the leader can benefit from deploying marketing principles as well: An uncluttered message rings clearer, particularly when it's accompanied by tight focus on content, packaging and image.

Today, candidates and leaders must tailor core messages for the 75-year-old newspaper reader and the 19-year-old who communicates using blogs and Facebook.

What's more, to have any chance of cutting through the clutter, the leader has to seem sincere and authentic to both demographics, not to mention all the Gen-Xers and boomers in between. He or she has to be all the flavors of root beer at once.

Consider House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Like many politicians before her, she went on "The Daily Show" last month to match wits with Jon Stewart, be made fun of and maybe make a point to a coveted audience of hyper-aware, media-savvy Americans. She didn't tank, but she appeared painfully overeager.

To neutralize the static, she needed the kind of banter that Stewart and NBC anchorman Brian Williams had a couple of nights later. It was amiably contentious and brimming with pop-culture cues. It was also just plain fun, a key element in capturing the "Daily Show" demographic's attention.

Same Difference?

Across the continent from Galco's and the dizzying choices of Los Angeles, another town struggles with its choices. But the options are different.

In this community, people are choosing their kitchenware, not from Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel but from silver or pewter. They're choosing new clothes, not from Wal-Mart or Nordstrom but from the 40 or so fabrics at the local millinery. They're choosing transportation, not Jeep or Toyota but feet or horse.

And they're choosing sides: loyalist or rebel, status quo or treason.

Colonial Williamsburg is a city deliberately frozen in time, on the cusp of the American Revolution, when it was Virginia's capital. Walking its 18th-century streets, seeing actor-interpreters bring revolutionary-era Virginians back to life, you could believe that the choices here were far fewer.

Yet for its era, Williamsburg was a cosmopolitan town, bustling with a merchant class and a spread of consumer goods that presaged modern America.

It also was crackling with revolutionary activity. Its citizens wrestled with their responsibilities and seizing their future. They confronted a lot of static and still managed to participate in the birthing of American democracy.

"Not everybody was running around yelling, 'Yeah, yeah, liberty, death,'" says Dennis Watson, a Scottish-born American who portrays Williamsburg printer and newspaperman Alexander Purdie. "But," he says, "this time they truly came together."

There are lessons for us, and for our leaders, in the people of Colonial Williamsburg.

They, too, had choices far more abundant than their predecessors. They, too, struggled to manage their bandwidth and avoid letting distractions prevail. They may not have had Xboxes, but they had more options than most anyone outside of Boston or Philadelphia.

We are products of our age, too. If we can process 21st-century distractions and negotiate our lives, and most of us do, can't we be active in our democracy, too? The ability to Twitter and TiVo does not by itself preclude civic participation. Everyone has, well, a choice.

"This country is an experiment. And for it to have endured for this long, it requires the involvement of citizens - citizens making choices," says Jim Bradley, who manages public affairs for Colonial Williamsburg.

OPTIONS ABOUND

It's hard to imagine that just a generation or two ago, you couldn't buy a burger at 2 a.m., couldn't own a copy of your favorite TV show on a shiny plastic disc, couldn't walk into a giant box store and choose from more than 100,000 items from all over the world. Today, it's all part of the expected consumer landscape. So take a deep breath: Here are a few randomly selected examples of drastically expanded consumer choice in this country that you wouldn't have seen a few decades ago:

•Number of flavors and sizes of Doritos tortilla chips: 22, from Salsa Verde to Hot Wings, made by Frito Lay.

•Number of auctions on eBay: 14.9 million listings across 34 categories and hundreds of subcategories, on Aug. 4.

•Number of books available on Amazon: 22.7 million on Aug. 4.

•Number of colors of paint: More than 1,500, from "Coming Up Roses" to "Sockeye" to "Habanero Chili," sold by Sherwin-Williams.

•Number of recipes: More than 40,000 available at allrecipes.com, a popular cooking Web site.

•Number of items on a fast-food menu: 84, at Taco Bell.

•Number of magazines launched in 2007: 204 titles, according to The Wall Street Journal.

•Number of flavors you can add to your prescription medicine so it won't taste bad: 20, including "Grapeade," "Banana Pie" and "Bubblegum," at CVS drugstores.

Source: The Associated Press

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