Having too many choices when shopping is considered by many people to be a big problem today. Some experts are beginning to wonder if many varieties of one thing may be too much of a good thing.
Have you tried to buy breakfast food lately? Was trying to find the right thing to eat difficult? Some stores have more than 40 varieties of breakfast food, and more are on the way. According to one expert, people can spend a large part of their lives making decisions about what to buy. For example, a simple trip to buy butter, sugar, and carrots could take all day. It's tiring to spend extra time shopping.
Some shoppers, of course, don't mind this at all. Anatoly Rosinsky, a Russian who now lives in Los Angeles, recalls, "In Russia, if you want to buy a tin of beer, you stand in line for half an hour. Then you have one choice if they have beer that day. Here, you spend 30 minutes deciding which beer to buy. In the end, you lose about the same amount of time. But this way it's much more pleasant."
Some people, however, think there is a bigger problem than losing time: stress.
"You can go into a major shopping area and after one hour it feels like your mind is dead. The reason is that there are too many things to pick from," says an expert. He adds that people nowadays feel they have to consider environmental problems (such as whether the product is harmful to the environment). They also have to consider health problems (such as whether the product contains harmful materials). "It's a very big job," he says, "well beyond the level of stress that our parents knew 20 years ago."
A recent study also shows that having too many choices is one of the reasons why some people buy too many things. One woman in New York has 187 belts in her house, and most of them have never been used or even looked at. A man thinks that only the most expensive exercise bicycle will help improve his body, even though he already owns a lot of body-building equipment that he doesn't use.
Such people can't control their shopping. Some doctors think this problem is as serious and dangerous as using drugs or drinking too much.
"They think that owning things makes them feel better," says Dr. Francesca Kress, director of a program in New York City that treats people who shop too much. "As their lives become more and more terrible, they will buy themselves something they can't afford," Kress says. "When material objects are used as a way to make yourself feel better, there's a problem," according to Kress. "Rather than deal with the problem, they think that they can go out and buy something to make themselves feel better," Kress says.
Kress's program helps patients to change their spending habits and also tries to get to the root of the patient's problem.
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