Yesterday, Seth Godin blogged on Choice.

I was interested in the line

I used to have one choice to make a phone call. Now I have a dozen. I used to have one place to buy insurance for my company, now I have thousands. One bank near my house, now ten thousand a click away.

As desirable as choice is, we aren’t very good at making choices and marketers pick that up and run with it.

Making choices and making good choices is a very different thing. Making good choices requires a lot of time-consuming research, looking at opinions, reviews, etc., and doing many things that are boring, time-consuming or difficult.

There are two very important points. One, schools are not teaching critical thinking very well, until (arguably) the university stage. Two, we have such dense lifestyles that the effort needed to make good choices can be exhausting. These two things leave us vulnerable to marketers who do not have our best interests in mind.

 For example, packaged foods brag about not having trans fats. While this is a good thing, these same foods are often loaded with saturated fat, which is almost as bad as trans fat. There are often healthier choices, but it take effort to find these foods (and effort to learn about healthier choices), and the power of the biggest marketer can often overwhelm our critical sensibilities, which is often the point of marketing.

So where does the responsibility lie? That’s the tough question. Companies sell products as cheaply manufactured as possible, which means opting for cheaper ingredients in the case of food, cheaper materials like lead paint in the case of toys, and so on.  Companies say that the consumer should do the research and decide for themselves, caveat emptor. And then go on to hard-sell their products with advertising designed to overwhelm our better judgement.

Should the government regulate and control? Or should the consumer educate themselves?

Choice isn’t a bad thing especially when monopolies with bad intentions create massive amounts of damage, but it can be quite difficult to make good choices.

Share This