The appeal of big box retailers has always been a mystery to
me. On those rare occasions when I have
to go to a place like Bed, Bath, and
Beyond, I often find it frustrating.
Not long ago, I had to get a new coffee maker, and I fought through the
crowd in the parking lot into the store.
From there, I stood before the wall of coffee makers, struggling to
decide which of the huge number of options would be best. There were so many choices, that I am not at
all sure that I got the best one.
So, why are these stores so crowded?
There is an interesting tradeoff at work here. On the one hand, people want to have lots of
options. That gives them the feeling
that their choice is not at all constrained.
On the other hand, as the number of options goes up, the choice gets
more difficult to make, and that can make it hard to know whether you have made
a good decision.
An interesting paper in the December, 2012 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research by Joseph
Goodman and Selin Malkoc examined how people resolve this tradeoff. They find that preferences for the size of a
set of options depends on the distance to the choice.
Lots of work, starting with studies by Yaacov Trope and Nira
Liberman have explored influences of distance on thinking. This work suggests that as an event gets
nearer in space or time, people think about it more specifically. When that
event gets further in space or time, people think about it more
abstractly.
In the case of choices, thinking more specifically has two
effects. On the one hand, when you think
about a choice specifically, each of the options feels distinct. The individual properties of a set of coffee
makers, for example, becomes important.
So, thinking specifically can make you want a larger set of options. When you think about the choice abstractly,
all of the options seem more similar, and so the size of the set of options
becomes less important.
However, thinking specifically can also make it clear how
hard it is to choose from among a large set of options. This choice difficulty is less prominent when
thinking abstractly.
The researchers found that distance can have both influences
on the way people evaluate sets of options.
In most normal cases, people are not that focused on how
hard it will be to make a choice. In
those situations, decreasing distance to a choice makes people think about the
options as distinct.
In one study, college students were told about two
restaurants that were opening. They were
going to be offered a gift certificate good for a free entrée on the day the
restaurant opened. They had to pick
which restaurant they wanted to try.
Participants saw the menus for each restaurant. One restaurant had many options (14), while
the other had only a few (7). Some participants were told that the restaurant
was opening that day (near in time), while other participants were told the
restaurant was opening in five months (far in time).
When participants were making the choice for a restaurant
opening that day, they picked the restaurant with the larger selection 63% of
the time. When they were selecting a
restaurant that was opening in five months, they picked the one with the larger
assortment only 46% of the time.
In another study, participants were told to imagine that
they were planning a dinner party for friends that was taking place the next
day or several months later. They
discovered that their blender had broken and they needed a new one before the
party. In this case, they had a choice
between two stores, one of which had a larger assortment (18 blenders) than the
other (6 blenders). People saw
descriptions of the blenders, which were designed to be of about the same
quality. Participants were also asked to
look over the set and to rate how similar they thought the set of blenders
was.
As in the previous study, participants were more likely to
select the store with the larger assortment when they were going shopping that
day than when they were going shopping in several months. In addition, people perceived the entire set
of blenders to be less similar when they were going shopping that day than when
they were going shopping in several months.
This combination of results shows that people see the items as more
unique when they are near in time to the event than when they are far from it.
Another study in this series examined the case where people
were also focused on the difficulty of making a choice. This study was similar to the one I just
described except that some people were also told that evaluating each blender
in the store would take between 3 and 5 minutes. That information made it clear that
evaluating a larger assortment would take much more time than evaluating a smaller
one.
In this study, participants who were not focused on the
difficulty of making a choice showed the same pattern as the previous
studies. They preferred the store with
the larger assortment when they were making the choice that day than when they
were making it in several months. When
people were focused on the difficulty of making a choice, though, the pattern
flipped. Now, they were more interested
in the store with the smaller assortment when they were making the choice
immediately and the store with the larger assortment when making the choice in
several months.
Ultimately, both factors should play some role when making a
choice. In cases where it is critical
that you find an option that perfectly fits your needs, it is good to have a
large assortment (as long as you have the time and ability to evaluate all of
the items). Most of the time, though,
you probably need something that is just good enough. In those cases, it might be better to find a
store with a smaller number of high-quality options.
Finally, remember that you will think differently about the
value of having many options depending on how far away the choice is from you.
Take that into account when deciding where to shop.
