Tesco is one of the biggest supermarket chains in the world.  It has decided to scrap 30,000 of the 90,000 products from its shelves, partly in response to competition, partly because it is making huge losses. Tesco used to offer 28 tomato ketchups and 224 kinds of air freshener.  They now understand that customers are time constrained, that increased choice can be bad for you and, worse, it results in losses that upset shareholders.

We used to be told that choice is good for us, that it confers on us freedom, personal responsibility, and autonomy.  American psychologist and professor of social theory Barry Schwartz, in his book “The Paradox of Choice”, writes “If we’re rational, [social scientists] tell us, added options can only make us better off as a society. This view is logically compelling, but actually it isn’t true.”

For instance, a big accounting firm offers 156 different retirement plans. ”Which of us, really, feels competent to choose between 156 varieties of pension plan?” One of Schwartz’s colleagues got access to the records of Vanguard, a mutual-fund company, and found that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down 2% – even though by not participating, employees were passing up as much as $5,000 a year from the employer who would happily match their contribution.

Increased choice can make us miserable because of confusion, lack of comprehension, opportunity costs and sheer impatience with the whole damn thing.  Worse, increased choice has created a new problem: the escalation in expectations. At a certain point, choice shifts from having a positive relationship with happiness to an inverse one. So, what’s the answer? “The secret to happiness is low expectations,” says Schwarz sensibly.

Most of us end up buying the same things we have been buying for years.  There are other issues on our minds than whether to buy French, Irish or New Zealand butter.  Familiarity breds ataraxia.  If you live in the United States everything has sugar in it, anyway, even soup, so there is no point in changing.  By the way, Epicurus lived on a Mediterranian diet. Another leaf to take out of his book.