One Nation, with niches for all

Lovely little essay from Stacy Schiff (author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America") in NY Times, about the crazy democracy of our shopping options:

E. B. White claimed he knew his wife was the girl for him when she referred to dental floss as "tooth twine." I take his point. I also tried to buy "tooth twine" recently. By any name, that is an exercise in frustration, or affluence-induced A.D.D., or option overload. If there is plain old standard issue dental floss out there, it is on the shelf with the all-purpose running shoes and the unadulterated, adjectiveless cup of coffee.

In taking cluster analysis and its classifications to the logical extreme, are we not building a superfinicky society? Five minutes in any Starbucks line will answer that one. We used to be one nation, undivided, under three networks, three car companies and two brands of toothpaste for all. Today we are the mass niche nation. This is a country in which 40 percent of the eligible population doesn't vote, but can be expected to maneuver its way through a sprawl of options every time it heads out for tooth twine. Increasingly the brick-and-mortar world resembles the virtual one: an infinite landscape of microscopic subcategories, in which one loses oneself, twice.

A friend in Seattle - I'll call him Mitch, because that is his name - reports a full-scale identity crisis in the toothpaste aisle. There he stood, two coupons in hand. Was he ready to become a rejuvenating-effects, tartar-protection kind of guy, or was he wed to the fight against tobacco stains? And to think it all used to boil down to squeezing from the bottom.

The transformative power is dizzying. The pressure is on; the paralysis sets in. It's like a torture session with a demonic optometrist. If A is better than B, and 2 is better than 3, is A better than 2? How to choose among tartar-control and whitening and breath-enhancing? And moreover - this is America - why should we have to? I want it all. Darwinistically speaking, shouldn't "whitening" have automatically ceded to "extra whitening" anyway?

As an American Dental Association spokesman, Dr. Richard Price, admits, the proliferation is out of control. "You should not need a Ph.D. to go through a dental aisle," he says. He points to a healthy economy, and to the marketing wizards who realized that while cavities had no future, a multitude of other niches remained to be filled. "If you build it they will come," Dr. Price says, which is precariously close to something on which P. T. Barnum once banked. There's a niche born every minute, too.

It turns out that there are some good excuses for the toothpaste aisle, an aging population and the advent of the electric toothbrush among them. It's also true that E. B. White's pharmacy was not supersized. The options have expanded to fit longer shelves, fatter wallets, bigger homes. Both our refrigerators and our expectations are outsized. This is manifest destiny meets "American Idol." The only thing that has not expanded proportionately is my brain capacity.

Hasn't Procter & Gamble heard about the dumbing down of America? To say nothing of the fact that we have simultaneously managed to boil the political discourse down to red states vs. blue states.

Is there a name for what I'm experiencing? Of course there is, replies John Quelch, the Harvard Business School consumer marketing guru, who began laughing as soon as he heard the words "toothpaste aisle." He was quick to diagnose "analysis paralysis at the point of sale." Paco Underhill, perhaps our most diligent student of the science of shopping, terms it the "confusion index." And yes, it's growing. As are the fractures among us.

Mr. Quelch offers only one survival strategy: "Walk on by." After all, he says, "It wouldn't happen if we didn't buy it." The manufacturers of toothpaste are not exactly worrying about our tuning out. It's a free market. Furthermore, Mr. Quelch adds, "it's rather difficult to compute all the sales that never happen because of analysis paralysis."

You can't please all of the people all of the time, but you can sell a segment of them something at least that often. The market won't rest until it has located that last stalwart who isn't budging until he hears about cough-suppressing, posture-correcting, wrinkle-reducing, memory-enhancing, antioxidant dental floss. On the other hand, when he meets someone who shares that passion, he can be certain he has found precisely the girl for him.