We Are Entering An Era Of Unprecedented Choice. And That's A Good Thing

In 1978, Saturday Night Live featured a skit about the “Scotch Boutique,” a store in a trendy mall that sells nothing but Scotch tape in many varieties.

Its proprietors puzzle over the absence of customers—they offer so many kinds of tape that surely one should appeal to nearly everyone. And yet no traffic.
The skit reveled in the cluelessness of the tape-obsessed store owners.

Could anything be more absurd than a Scotch Tape store?

Yet in 2004, a store called “Rice to Riches” actually opened in Manhattan. It sells rice pudding in more than twenty flavors and nothing else. It is reportedly doing well and expanding into a mail-order business.

Meanwhile, the White House chain just sells home furnishing in white. It's proven so successful that it’s been joined by the Black House.

Yesterday’s joke is today’s reality.

We are in the midst of the biggest explosion of variety in history. You can see it all around you, but sometimes a few numbers make the point even better.

There are precisely 19,000 variations of Starbucks coffee, according to the advertising firm OMD.

In 2003 alone, 26,893 new food and household products were introduced, including 115 deodorants, 187 breakfast cereals, and 303 women’s fragrances, according to Mintel International’s Global New Products database.

Back in the 1960s, Chevrolet’s Impala sedan accounted for more than 1 million of the 8 million cars sold each year, close to 13 percent of a market that had no more than forty different kinds of cars.

Today, in a car market nearly ten times that size, there are more than two hundred and fifty models available (more than one thousand if you count all the variants).

Fewer than ten of those sell more than 400,000 units, or one-half percent of the market.