“But the idea that choice is bad for us flies in the face of what we’ve been told for decades.”
LOL. An academic justification of the Bernie Sanders “one-state-issued-deodorant” and one state issued tampon theory.
What the author doesn’t understand is that time is part of consumer choices. I could spend an infinite amount of time making the perfect choice. But many would rather spend 5 seconds making a choice that’s just OK (husbands at grocery stores, for example).
So the stores referred to are selling time and convenience in addition to deoderent. Consumers may prefer to trade off convenience for extra choices. If so, the store will be successful.
Push limiting choice too far (Bernie Sanders) and you get neither time nor convenience but “State Issued Deodorant #1”.
If Bernie wins the Democrat nomination, he will be a sitting duck in debates and ads for any Republican nominee with half a brain:
Bernie, you said: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”
So let me get this straight, Bernie . . . you're going to set up an agency or a czar to determine how many kinds of deodorant, and how much of it, can be permitted by law?
Will you do the same with toilet paper? I mean look how many brands of toilet paper there are. Shall we just set up a monopoly of one company, or better yet, a government monopoly, to produce exactly the right amount of toilet paper, or otherwise limit the amount of toilet paper that gets produced?
Are you going to hire Michael Gruber to be the guy who figures out the correct amount of toilet paper that people should be allowed to use? He's smart. He teaches at MIT. So why shouldn't we put him in charge of figuring out exactly how much of everything should or shouldn't be produced for the American people?
Have you been to socialist Venezuela lately, Bernie? They seem to have solved the problem of too many toilet paper brands. Because right now there is no toilet paper to be had at all in socialist Venezuela."
So tell me Bernie, what exactly will you do to feed starving children by reducing the amount of toilet paper we have in this country? And by the way, when you close all the toilet paper companies, how will the people who used to work at them feed their own starving children?
Bernie? . . . .
As always, the market will find a happy medium.
My local grocery store is smaller and has fewer choices. But it is closer, and cheaper, and most of the time I can get what I want, or at least something close to it.
When I want something specific, I drive the extra miles to the Mega-shop, pay a little more, and get what I want. They’re happy to take my money, too.
Capitalism rules.