NOTE: I’m trying out Flickr’s “Post to Blog” feature. So far, so good. Feels weird typing a post outside of the ‘oaf. Thanks to Raymond Yee for the the encouragement.

I am having an imagination block. I can’t, for the life of me, imagine what supermarkets were like prior to the “choice explosion.” What did that even look like? Was the shelf real estate currently dedicated to all 12 types of Oreos full of just plain-jane Oreos (and perhaps Double Stuf)? Or maybe grocers are packing it in tighter now, while 80’s Safeways just had fewer products visible? If someone could show us photos of old supermarket shelves, that would be great.

A while back, I watched Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk, “What We Can Learn from Spaghetti Sauce,” in which Gladwell traces the root of this choice explosion. He noted that we’d all rate products higher if smaller taste clusters were allowed to have their own niche product (spicy v. chunky sauce).

One noticeable product that has failed to produce many wacky spin-offs is ketchup. Gladwell himself points that out here in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/09/06/040906fa_fact_gladwell

Microsoft released Vista in some complex combinatoric matrix. Where does hyperchoice become more stressful, and how can I get out of the store without spending many minutes deciding between “Free Range” and “Omega-3 Infused” eggs?

UPDATE: Flickr and the ‘oaf’s stylesheets aren’t playing nice. Can’t get the image to show.