SKU Overload (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

If you read my column last month on the phenomenon of choice overload — the paralysis that comes from having too many options — you surely could not be surprised by the Wall Street Journal’s report last week on Bed Bath & Beyond’s new CEO, Mark Tritton.

“The former Target Corp. executive has spent the first 100 days on the job thinking about how many different types of can openers the retailer should stock,” reporter Suzanne Kapner wrote, in a sentence I trust was not to be taken literally. “After the chain cut the number of options from more than a dozen to about three, sales rose.”

I’m writing about this subject again so soon because I keep seeing more examples. It’s like buying a new car and suddenly realizing just how many of them are on the road.

On the same day the WSJ reported on Tritton’s mission to “declutter” BB&B stores, my husband and I made our first trip to Raising Cane’s, the franchise chicken restaurant that opened on East McCain Boulevard in North Little Rock back in December.

The last thing I thought this world needed was another chicken joint. This market already supports Chick-fil-A, KFC, Popeyes, Church’s, Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, Stickyz Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken Shack, Zaxby’s and Arkansas’ own fast-growing chain, Slim Chickens. (I’ll undoubtedly hear about some I forgot.) When I get a hankering for chicken, I already had a choice overload. I did not need another option.

But our son keeps raving about Raising Cane’s. He drives 12 miles from his house in Little Rock to eat there — bypassing innumerable other restaurants — so we figured we could drive 2 miles to check it out. And guess what? Everything on the menu is good. I can say this with confidence because I tried everything — the one variety of chicken fingers, the one dipping sauce, french fries, coleslaw, Texas toast. There are literally more fountain drinks than food choices on the simplest restaurant menu I have ever seen.

Deciding what to order the next time I’m there will be a no-brainer. So will opting to go elsewhere if anyone in the party is not up for fried chicken.

I made note of Tritton’s streamlining of Bed Bath & Beyond on Twitter, and an out-of-state friend responded: “I am paralyzed in the toothbrush aisle.” She said one reason she likes shopping at Aldi, an option we don’t have in central Arkansas, “is the limited choice — usually just the one brand of anything.”

Not coincidentally, Aldi is the corporate forebear of Trader Joe’s, which offers a tenth as many separate merchandise choices (what retailers call stock-keeping units, or SKUs) as a typical supermarket.

A day later, a random Twitter person — it was David Gura of MSNBC, but since I don’t watch cable news, his name was unfamiliar to me — started a conversation about choice overload this way: “Is there a section of the store that is more confusing and overwhelming than the toothpaste aisle?” Responses flooded in — shampoo, lightbulbs, cold medicine, snack chips, cereal, breads, razors, toilet paper.

Folks, we have a lot of overwhelmed consumers. It should not be this hard or frustrating to spend money. One Twitter user suggested that Gura “try the dollar store.” There’s a reason Dollar General consistently has a higher gross profit margin than Walmart and is spreading like wildfire in rural areas. No trip to Greers Ferry Lake is complete without a stop at Dollar General, and anything I can’t get there is something I can live without for a day or two.

Some of Gura’s respondents complained about the overwhelming number of choices in the Democratic presidential primary, but that’s being winnowed down pretty quickly, and in a way depressingly similar to the GOP’s choice overload in 2016. Too many choices favors the extremist with the most passionate minority of supporters, even though a more mainstream, plain-vanilla candidate would appeal to more voters in the general election.

The consumer product category that generated the most complaints for choice overload was feminine hygiene products — helpful husbands even noted the overwhelming number of options. I bring this up only to remind you that shelters for homeless and battered women need these products, which are a significant and unavoidable expense.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.