Peter Jackson column

Jul 6 2006 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

One of the fundamental benefits of capitalism - and one of its fundamental drivers - is, supposedly, choice.

Henry Ford, however, who was one of the last century's arch-capitalists, was notoriously dismissive of choice, with his famous `any colour they want as long as it's black' philosophy.

Of course, had he had a competitor who could sell cars of the same quality as cheaply he would have had to revise that philosophy pretty smartish, or go out of business.

But there are times when I find myself sympathising with Henry Ford, most often when domestic duties take me to the supermarket. I was there the other weekend and, having reached a certain obsessive Victor Meldrewish stage in life, I found myself counting the number of varieties of Cheddar in the cheese section. There were 22.

Please don't get me wrong, I think Cheddar is a fine cheese. There may be more interesting cheeses, such as Lancashire or Wensleydale (of each of which the supermarket stocks only one variety) but Cheddar is fine with me - but 22 varieties?

As far as I'm concerned, there's mild cheddar, mature cheddar and in-between cheddar, and that's it, that's all you need. Any more is merely confusion.

It seems I'm not alone in this belief.

In a US study it was found that the more choice people are given, the less choice they make.

In an experiment a taste-test booth was set up in a supermarket on two consecutive Saturdays. On the first Saturday, six jams were provided for tasting and on the second 24 were placed in the booth.

The greater selection of jams attracted more people to visit the booth but the smaller selection resulted in significantly more sales, with 30% of those given the more restricted choice buying, compared to only 3% of those who were faced with an abundance of jam.

Perhaps this explains the expansion of the low cost, no frills discount stores such as Aldi and Lidl.

It may be that, far from being handicapped by only offering 600 to 1,000 lines compared to the 40,000 available in a large Tesco, the stores are positively attractive to some customers - and not just on price grounds.