THE CLASS OF 2022

IN EVERY PRODUCT CATEGORY YOU CAN THINK OF, American consumers now have almost unlimited choice.

- Nancy Cooper

You can walk into any large supermarket and easily find 10 or 15 different brands of, say, hand soap, on the shelves. Then you could pull out your phone, look online and find dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands, more being sold everywhere from big retailers like Amazon and Walmart to small specialty stores to innumerable online-only small labels. New brands and varieties pop up everyday. It is probably not much of an exaggeration to say that if you can imagine a kind of hand soap, somebody either makes it now or will be making it soon.

What’s true for soap is also true for just about every other category of household consumer product. On the one hand, having a huge and constantly growing array of choices is great for shoppers: now we can pick products not only for price and convenience, but also for how they align with our personal and social values, things which numerous surveys indicate have grown in importance to shoppers as the pandemic has reshuffled our priorities. But unlimited choice also raises the tricky question: how do you pick amongst so many seemingly similar products, particularly when new, supposedly better ones are constantly arriving?