by Monica Showalter, All News Pipeline:
Leave it up to The Atlantic to tell us we’ve got too many food choices in a grocery store, and for our own good, we ought to have less.
That’s pretty much what writer Adam Fleming wrote in his plaintive cry against too much choice at the grocery store.
On a recent afternoon, while running errands before I had to pick up my kids from school, I froze in the orange-juice aisle of a big-box store. So many different brands lay before me: Minute Maid, Simply, Tropicana, Dole, Florida’s Natural, Sunny D — not to mention the niche organic labels. And each brand offered juices with various configurations of pulp, vitamins, and concentrate. The sheer plenitude induced a kind of paralysis: Overwhelmed by the choices on offer, I simply could not make one. I left the store without any orange juice.
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According to the American Time Use Survey, an average grocery trip takes more than 40 minutes. That may not sound like much, but the task can feel overwhelming and time-consuming in the midst of a busy day, especially because every trip consists of a plethora of decisions. Through this lens, what seems like a modern benefit — 100 different kinds of ice cream! Every imaginable chip flavor! Hot-dog buns sliced on the side or on the top! — can become a bit of a burden.
Cripes, of all the things to complain about.
We have this thing known as “Google,” and we have subscriptions to publications such as Consumer Reports, which help consumers pare down to the best choices, if that’s a big deal to him. I guess he’s never heard of them.
He does tout his preference for “single option stores” such as Aldi and Trader Joe’s, which are great options for people with this problem.
Well? That’s a choice. Just as we have choice with products in a grocery, we have our choice of groceries to go to, with different emphases. That’s called the free market.
We all love those single-option stores and shop at them at least as much as we do the big high-variety grocery stores. Who doesn’t love a trip to Trader Joe’s?
But they aren’t the only places we go to.
He notes that sometimes these single-option stores don’t have the items he wants. Well, that is where the big groceries come in.
When you need something specific, and rare, such as dukkah, piquillo peppers, fresh escarole, giant sardines, flatiron steak, squid in its own ink, or orecchiette pasta, there is no argument — thank goodness for the big variety groceries, which do carry those items, often year round. Sometimes even the ethnic markets don’t have these items.
And when there’s a brand you really, really like, such as Goya or Al Fresco, and you’ll buy it no matter what it sells, once again, thank goodness for big groceries. They’ll accommodate.
Go to those big groceries, get the one item you want, and exit the premises. Is it that hard?
Now, based on the guy’s preferences and rationale, he sounds as though he might be on the autism spectrum. I have no idea if he is, but I do know that autistic people are sensitive to too much “noise” or stimulus, which is where Aldi can be helpful.
But most of us aren’t autistic.
His argument for less choice rather than more is a personal preference, and a perfectly legitimate one. But it shouldn’t be forced onto everyone, which is what he seems to be arguing.
What’s bad here is that his argument is kind of redolent of the Bernie Sanders argument demanding fewer choices of deodorant, like what they had in the Soviet Union.
Remember when Bernie was complaining about too much choice in the deodorant aisles?
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