When Less Becomes More: What My CD Collection Taught Me About Choice

I've started listening to CDs again. Not out of nostalgia, or because I want to be at

the bleeding edge of hipster (vinyl? So old news), but because I find myself paralysed by Spotify. With 100 million tracks available, I'd spend 15 minutes scrolling through recommendations, only to give up and listen to the same familiar albums anyway. My CD collection - around 100 discs accumulated more than twenty years ago - is the easier option.

The Jam Study: A Lesson in Less

This experience maps perfectly to a well-known study in 2000 on jam: when Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper displayed 24 jam varieties in an upscale California grocery store, only 3% of shoppers made a purchase. But when they shrank the selection to just six varieties, purchasing rebounded to 30%. One quarter the options meant ten times the conversion rate.

Why We Rely on Stereotypes

The mechanism at work here isn't laziness or lack of engagement - it's cognitive overload. When faced with abundant choice, we deploy mental shortcuts to manage the complexity. One of the most powerful shortcuts? Stereotypes. We take vast, nuanced information and compress it into simple, digestible categories. "German cars are reliable." "This bank is for young people." "Spotify is for discovering new music; CDs are for listening to old favourites."

These stereotypes aren't necessarily wrong - they're survival mechanisms for navigating information-rich environments. But they reveal something crucial about how customers actually make decisions in your category.

The Australian Choice Paradox

Consider the Australian marketplace. Walk down a supermarket cereal aisle and you'll face over 300 different varieties.

Try to compare energy providers and you're navigating dozens of retailers, each with multiple plans and rate structures. In automotive, we have over 60 brands competing for attention. Australians selecting a superannuation fund can choose from more than 100 options - a decision that will shape their retirement, yet most people default to whatever their employer offers because comparison is overwhelming.

Then there's banking: more than 240 retail options when you include credit unions and building societies. That's not differentiation; that's decision paralysis waiting to happen.

The Real-World Consequences

For automotive buyers, the cognitive load becomes so heavy that many retreat to brand stereotypes ("Toyota = reliable, BMW = premium") rather than genuinely comparing the actual vehicles that might suit their needs. In superannuation, the sheer complexity means most Australians never actively choose - they accept whatever fund they're automatically enrolled in, even when better options exist. In energy retail, customers often pay loyalty taxes by staying with their provider, not out of satisfaction but because switching feels too complicated.

Enter the Omega Rule

There's another consequence of choice overload that's equally revealing: reversion to what's familiar. I've been buying Weet-Bix for more than 40 years. Not because I've carefully evaluated it against those 300+ cereal options every time I shop, but because making that decision anew would be long and potentially wasteful, and to be frank, just plain exhausting. What I've actually done is create an "Omega Rule" - a rigid, non-negotiable criterion that instantly eliminates decision-making.

"I buy Weet-Bix" isn't a preference; it's a rule that allows me to walk past 299 other options without cognitive effort.

The problem is that Omega Rules, once established, become remarkably resistant to change. In a normally sized product category, "Delta Moments" - those influential moments of a TV ad or a friend's recommendation that would get me to consider something new - would occur naturally. But the cost of rationally evaluating alternatives – in time and in dollars - are so high, we ignore signals that would normally prompt reconsideration. So instead, I'm locked into a choice I made decades ago.

What This Means for Business

The irony here is that so often we see businesses equating more choice with more sales. More variants, more features, more options to customize. But my CD collection says otherwise. Constraint creates clarity. Limited options force engagement with what's actually there, rather than endless searching for something theoretically better.

Every additional choice point - even seemingly helpful ones - adds cognitive friction.

This has implications beyond product range. It extends to how we design customer experiences, structure surveys, present information on websites, and communicate value propositions.

The Uncomfortable Question

So here's the uncomfortable question: Are you offering your customers too much choice? Are your customers enthusiastic enough about your category to invest the time and effort of finding their ideal? Or are you chasing the appearance of customer-centricity (look at all these options!) rather than the reality of how people actually make decisions?

The jam study is 25 years old, but its lesson remains uncomfortably relevant. Sometimes, the best thing we can do for our customers is to make fewer jams.