Mustard Now Comes in Dozen of Varieties, Why Has Ketchup Stayed the Same?

Yes, why is that? Malcolm Gladwell uses a whole chapter to explore this in What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures.

Yeah, why is that?

More on having choices...

From the economist: potato chips only come in 3 flavours a little over a decade ago, ready salted, BBQ and salt & vinegar, but nowadays a whole lot of glamorous flavours.

There's an interesting experiment by an upmarket grocery store in California. In the first test they offered a tempting array of 24 different jams to taste, on a different day they displayed just six. It turned out that more shoppers stopped at the display when there were 24 jams, but more shoppers bought from the display of six.

The researchers repeated the experiment with chocolate as well as student essay tipics and found similar results.

Actually too many choices makes it hard to decide.

'The fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better.'

- Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less