In his opening chapter, Schwartz recounts his troubles buying jeans at The Gap. What used to be a five-minute task requiring no more information than a waist size and length now demands multiple decisions and an unnerving amount of self-awareness. What leg shape and denim wash say “Barry Schwartz”? What shape is his body really? “Finally, I chose the easy fit, because a ‘relaxed fit’ implied that I was getting soft in the middle and needed to cover it up,” he writes.In a nifty bit of synchronicity, I heard a story this morning on NPR about a new use for an old system: matching people to jeans with computers and modified airport scanners.
Schwartz acknowledges that offering more styles and fits is good “for customers with varied tastes and body types,” but he discounts their interests. Ill-fitting jeans are a small price to pay for simplicity, he suggests. The Gap’s many choices, he says, have made buying jeans “a complex decision in which I was forced to invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety, and dread.” In the words of a Glamour editorial that cites Schwartz, “It’s enough to give even the most pro-choice girl one big headache.”
Intellifit: one key to solving Schwartz's paradox.
1 comment:
The New Yorker had a good article awhile back on the paralyzing effect of choice--oh, maybe it was the one in connection with the presidential election and quasi-rational way people make decisions. Anyway, from personal experience I remember being paralyzed by the ketchup aisle on my first trip to a supermarket after a year in India and environs. It's almost worth dysentery to be free of that.
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