The experience of shopping can be overwhelming to a guy like me who doesn’t have even one cell of the “shop till you drop” gene. Earlier this week I wrote about the research on the impact that having more and more choices has on discontent. Now this study, published earlier this year by Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota, demonstrates that more choices lead to fatigue as well as a breakdown of self-control. (Imagine that!)
Product selection has been exploding. The report cites that in 1976 the average American supermarket carried 9,000 different SKU’s. Today they carry 40,000 out of a million SKU’s available in the U.S. Starbuck’s alone boasts 19,000 different “beverage possibilities”.
So, while we demand more choices and options, the result is not that life gets easier and simpler, but that it becomes more challenging, tiring, and counterproductive.
Our brains have an “executive decision-making” function, what the Bible calls self-control. The function guides us toward goals, helps us deal with our emotions, regulate thought processes, help us persist toward the right things and resist the wrong impulses. But the very act of regulating yourself, which is exercising self control, expends energy. This depletion of energy, besides making you tired, begins to adversely impact the self-control function: you have less persistence, you procrastinate more, and your mental functions are not as sharp.
You get the picture. A Christmas shopping season full of exhausted people with diminished self control carrying supercharged credit cards at the mercy of retailers dangling too many bright and shiny objects in front of our glassy eyes…
As consumers we must be more aware of our vulnerability to making poor purchasing decisions when we are already tired from the holiday crush and when we are confronted by the massively increased inventory of new choices appealingly presented to us on store shelves.
From a business opportunity perspective, this fatigue coupled with a world of what I call “over-choice” are factors in the rise of businesses that help guide consumers to make "good" choices. Recent commercials from sites like www.gifts.com are an example of the trend. I think there is opportunity for innovation in helping people make good choices. More and more services will arise that act as trusted advisors in specialized areas.
And from a spiritual perspective, we need to understand that “self control” is a fruit of the Spirit. In other words, self control is a result produced in my life as I let the Spirit of God fill my life and guide me. I have only one decision to focus on – that is whether God guides my life or not. Listening to the guidance and promptings of God in my day to day life is the critical first step toward better decision making in my personal and professional life.
Download the research report and discuss it with your business colleagues. How can your business help your customers with this phenomenon?
And for yourself, read and memorize Galatians 5:22-23. Make the main decision focus of your day the decision to keep in step with God. And as the passage says, the result will be self control and a whole lot more.
