**4. The ambivalence of freedom of choice**

In post-industrial societies, the values of material well-being and rising living standards are closely intertwined with the notion of simultaneously maximizing people's individual freedoms [3]. In other words, existential security and its further strengthening and affirmation in a spiral of increasing abundance should be echoed in parallel at a similarly accelerated and progressive existential level in terms of the emancipation of human freedoms. An integral part of such freedoms is the fulfillment of the premise of a proliferation of choices and decisions in a variety of life situations. It is therefore true that the greater the plurality of choice in each individual decisionmaking situation, the more intense the personal freedoms people achieve. It should be added that the more freedoms there are, the greater the well-being.

An unbridled offering of products is intended to liberate and emancipate consumers in their ability to make free and authentic choices. In particular, some optimistic scenarios attribute to technological innovation an important function in the creation of abundance in the sense of the ever more voluminous generation of value from fewer resources, but also abundance represented by a more robust selection and variety of options in the areas of everyday consumption, education, and health [24].

There is no doubt that significant expansion of choice as one of the pillars of emancipation of individual freedoms is one of the defining features of the consumer culture of late modern societies. According to Lury [25], it is precisely the trend of accelerated growth in the quantity of types and classes of contemporary goods and the contemporary proliferation of sales and purchasing platforms that forms part of the fundamental parameters of contemporary consumer culture of societal well-being. The expansion of consumption opportunities is fundamentally driven by the increasingly massive conversion of conventional product offerings traditionally determined by the physical context of points of sale, dependent on the personal interactions of sellers and buyers, into the virtual environment of digitized shopping. The online environment of consumer activities is not limited by the space or physical capacity of points of sale and shelves. On the contrary, the virtual shopping environment accelerates the quantitative potential of the assortment of goods on offer and the variability in the selection of types and classes of different products. The digitalization of shopping formats not only contributes to an increase in the quantitative volume of product and service choices, but also to a more creative and personalized shopping experience overall. Thus, consumers are reorganizing their life standards and consumption preferences as a result of the introduction of the technological innovations of digitized shopping [19].

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed substantially to the speed of these changes, accelerated by the reorganization of consumer shopping patterns and the redefinition of consumption behavior. Everyday life was significantly transformed as a result of widespread lockdowns and home quarantines, as were routine consumer activities. Thus, opportunities for socially interactive individual shopping were reduced, leading to a massive shift of product offerings and sales to online virtual environments [26]. The digitalization of shopping formats has thus directly and indirectly influenced customers' consumption habits and decision-making strategies [27].

As such, the empirically identified and explicitly described causes of changes in consumption behavior thus undoubtedly include the fact of the forced conversion of conventional shopping to the virtual environment, where the confrontation of customers with the abundance of offerings was intensified and had essentially no other alternative. We can also see changes in the decision-making strategies of customers according to a meta-analysis of empirical data from various reputable public opinion research agencies that tracked various parameters of changes in consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. "Consumer decision-making and behavior change have rapidly adapted based on a range of individual and contextual characteristics" [19]. At the same time, there should also be evidence of higher levels of customer procrastination and even more demanding product selection criteria from shoppers.

In the spirit of rational choice theory, this is an uncomplicated situation, since every concrete decision and choice made is the result of a stable and reliably functioning hierarchy of the social actor's priorities and preferences of a social actor, who rationally applies such a system in every similar situation requiring an act of choice, regardless of the number of options needing to be compared and evaluated with each other as part of the implementation of the choice [28].

According to other behavioral economic studies, the conditions of such shopping are not only potentially more creative, varied, and comfortable, but also much more psychologically complicated and even reduce the level of positive feelings about shopping. Masatlioglu and Suleymanova [29] for example, address questions related to the adequate decision-making strategies of consumers and the dangers of procrastination

#### *Consumer Culture and Abundance of Choices: Having More, Feeling Blue DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105607*

or shopping resignation under the conditions of a dense network of product offerings that should psychologically facilitate choice and practically optimize its outcome. After all, consumers are confronted with numerous psychological and cognitively distorting elements of human thought [30]. While consumers seek to maximize their own utility and assume that their choices in acts of decision-making will lead to this maximization, the outcomes of choice often do not produce the expected effects. In fact, the little-considered reality of the ambivalent nature of consumer culture, sometimes referred to and interpreted as the "culture of overchoice" [31], fundamentally casts doubt on optimistic scenarios referencing theses of increasing consumer comfort and growing feelings of freedom, independence, authenticity, and pleasure resulting from accelerating consumer product choices [24], as assumed, for example, by economic theories of rational choice [32]. While acts of decision-making in an environment of growing choices increase the potential to achieve objectively better, i.e., higher quality, more useful, or more advantageous outcomes, they often instead paradoxically awaken feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, internal tension, disappointment, remorse, or regret [33, 34]. The thesis of a relationship between the escalation of the range of options, the growth of demands for continuous decision-making, and the increasing level of consumer dissatisfaction is also considered at a more general level by other authors [35–37].

#### **5. Why less can be more**

In the conditions of a performance consumer society, active participation in consumption is an indicator of individual success, prestige, and recognition [38]. The function of consumption is simultaneously to construct and reconstruct identities and to model social roles. It is becoming a source of self-reflection and the formation and sharing of symbolic worlds [39]. The consumer culture of affluent societies is equated with a culture of "many opportunities", providing ever greater volumes of choices and consumption goals in an expanding variety of product offerings. "There are millions of products available on store shelves nowadays" [40]. These conditions then contribute to a conviction that individual freedoms are continually increasing, both in the sphere of the material consumption of shopping itself, and in the dimension of symbolic values and signs, achieved and (re-)defined through different models of consumption behavior.

Consumer culture is characterized by an ambivalent nature. The more diverse and voluminous offering of choices on one hand raises optimistic expectations of expanding individual freedom and independence, while on the other hand it leads to high demands for individual responsibility in making choices and experiencing the outcomes of choices. According to some authors, this very fact leads to negative effects in the form of psychological discomfort, when the degree of inner anxiety and uncertainty and feelings of self-defeat increase as a result of a more complex decision-making process in an environment of many opportunities. Motivations grow stronger to postpone the decision or completely resign from making a choice [41]. On the contrary, similar experiences of negative emotions in the form of remorse and dissatisfaction might not occur in conditions of limited choices. In fact, the outcome of a choice in a situation of limited choices significantly relativizes the feeling of personal responsibility. Each individual decision takes place against a background of minimized consumer choice, and responsibility for the outcome in a context of limited choice can be at least partially shifted to the external circumstances of the system. For example, until the late 1980s, the range of consumer goods in socialist Czechoslovakia was dramatically reduced as the result of its centrally planned state economy to such an extent that something like the psychological discomfort of consumer choice was almost unknown. In such a world, part of the personal responsibility for choices made was thus transferred to an anonymous system of political, economic, cultural, or social parameters of society. Thus, every disadvantageous decision or bad choice need not be experienced as a personal failure. In contrast, a world of hypertrophy of opportunity delegates this responsibility strictly to individuals, who have to deal with the consequences of their own decisions independently. This has not ceased to be the case even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when freedom of consumer choice was preserved in spite of certain expectations and intensively exercised in the online environment of digital shopping formats. For some types of products in particular, freedom of choice was maintained and, in some cases, even enhanced due to the virtual environment.

Feelings of psychological discomfort under conditions of abundant choice are partially caused by opportunity cost. This is a situation where the satisfaction of each individual decision decreases as the number of options increases. For each individual choice at the same time means the rejection of other opportunities that remain unused and untried. Consumers develop fictions and fantasies, imagining hypothetical situations of alternative choices and comparing these with the outcome of a real choice that may appear disadvantageous or unattractive compared to similar imaginings. For example, the average supermarket today offers around 40,000 different items, but the average household needs on average around 150 products to ensure normal operations [42]. This means that the vast majority of the products offered by the average supermarket pass through the filters of consumer choice, at the cost of increasing opportunity cost. In the COVID-19 era, it is possible to consider some reduction in opportunity cost (and a reduced sense of "feeling of missing out") when consumer choice did not only focus on mainstream consumer products (food, clothing, electronics) but also, for example, on various activities and entertainment requiring social contacts. During the lockdown in particular, the options for paid and unpaid leisure activities were very limited and the space for choice drastically restricted.

In the post-COVID era, we are now witnessing the rapid revitalization of the space of choice in various areas of consumption, which reinforces feelings of individual freedom, yet also implies an increase in transaction costs. According to Mlčoch [43], the decision-making process and each choice made place considerable demands on the time, energy, and cognitive abilities of consumers seeking and comparing information about products, their prices, quality, and countless other characteristics. The increasing transaction costs associated with choice may ultimately lead consumers to resign and definitively refuse to make the planned choice. Vardi [44] illustrates such a situation with the example of Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union who, after very difficult negotiations with the Soviet authorities, were allowed to emigrate to Israel on a limited basis in the early 1970s. Smaller groups of Soviet emigrants were confronted in Israel with a Western-style economy and a standard of living equivalent to Western welfare standards. According to some memoirs, Jewish emigrants accustomed to the conditions of shopping in the Soviet Union found it difficult to navigate the goods on offer in Israeli supermarkets and often left without making a purchase.

This brings us to the problem where the principle of "more is better" moves actors not toward liberation but rather closer to states of paralysis and passivity. Czech [6] reached conclusions supporting this thesis in the present when studying the

#### *Consumer Culture and Abundance of Choices: Having More, Feeling Blue DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105607*

functioning of Swedish pension funds in recent decades. While 70 financial companies in Sweden had offered a total of 465 pension funds in 2000, this increased to 800 in 2006; by 2015, 102 companies were involved in the administration of a total of 843 pension funds in Sweden [6]. The consequence of the increasing options for types of pension savings was a delay in potential buyers pursuing such savings and an overall decline in pension savings contracts. For example, Google, following the recommendation of the results of one of its marketing studies, decided to increase the number of links listed on a single page when a specific password was entered. This move was oriented toward accommodating Google's customers, who had repeatedly expressed in surveys a desire to increase the amount of input when searching for information. When Google tripled the number of links per page, search and information tracking through Google began to plummet [45].

And yet other, namely behavioral economics studies consider this type of paralysis and resignation from making decisions due to being overwhelmed with large volumes of choices to be rather rare [46]. The more significant problem, as they see it, is the implementation of decisions that are not only disadvantageous, but often fatally damaging to the interests of the actors themselves. This is attributed to people's limited attention spans, their easy manipulability, and the underestimation or unintentional disregard of important product parameters, referencing their price or quality. In general, the behavioral economics perspective accepts the thesis that freedom of choice is not a guarantee of an efficient decision-making process, but only the potential to achieve optimized choice outcomes in terms of pursuing one's own goals and priorities. The reason is that the effectiveness of the decision-making process is significantly impaired by the limits of people's cognitive capacities and limited attention. When cognitive resources are depleted and attention is declining, the decision-making process turns into a shallow, intuitive affair, generating many missteps. This is especially true when dealing with information, where increasing volumes of information often do not lead to more efficient solutions and decisions, but rather to suboptimal outcomes and higher overall transaction costs [47].

## **6. The problem of choice and reduced satisfaction: Information, aspiration, adaptation**

At a general level, the behavioral and social sciences confirm the thesis that the proliferation of choices fundamentally complicates acts of decision-making, increases costs for consumers, and leads to an increase in indecision and feelings of dissatisfaction. Yet consumers reject potential and actual reductions in choice and experience them as a threat to their freedom of choice, especially for certain types of products [48]. This was confirmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the reduction of offline shopping options triggered a strong psychological response from consumers [2, 26]. As a result, business activities were concentrated in the online virtual shopping environment while more or less maintaining the abundance of product choices that consumer markets demanded. At the same time, due to health concerns, consumer demand grew for non-standard distribution channels for the goods purchased [49].

Let us next attempt to summarize and briefly describe the possible effects that may act as complementary and interrelated forces in the extensive field of consumer choices. Why, then, might we feel worse off in situations "when we have more"?

First of all, this is a problem of information. The easy availability and abundance of information is not only a more general defining feature of a contemporary technologically advanced society [50] and a common attribute of everyday behavior, but also an elementary principle of the functioning of consumer culture, where it is reproduced and confirmed by a globally functioning and operating platform of information flows from producers, sellers, and consumers. Decision-making based on easy and quick access to large volumes of information should, according to all the assumptions of rational choice theory, optimize choice or lead consumers to favorable or desirable choice outcomes in terms of their own expectations and desires. And yet behavioral economists point to the practical problem of people's cognitive limits and their declining ability to gather, organize, compare, and evaluate all available information on different products of interest in a comprehensible way. Thus, more information and escalating choices may not necessarily lead in a linear fashion to greater efficiency in achieving individual goals and making the most advantageous decisions. "However, because of limited attention and cognitive resources, people are not able to use all available information and freedom of choice effectively to achieve their own best interests" [40]. Imagine the amount of information that customers must accumulate, evaluate, and compare in their search for the best possible product choice when, for example, even a single brand of sporting goods in a retailer's catalog represents more than two dozen different individual parameters in an offering of tens and hundreds of other models of a similar product from other brands [33]. Is it even possible to organize and mutually compare hundreds and perhaps thousands of pieces of information from different quality parameters and features among such a wide range of product offerings?

Consumers are sensitive to this fact; as early as at the stage of decision and the making of the choice itself, they may be anticipating the inner turmoil and uncertainty of the final choice. Recall that this anticipation of internal tension due to a lack of options and means to evaluate all the information available to retailers is based on the knowledge that every choice made also implies a decision not to make alternative choices that may be more advantageous overall or that may prove after some time to have been more advantageous. The fact that consumers decide for the best possible option out of the available choices based of the amount of information available to them is thus accompanied by ongoing uncertainty and doubt, which also reduces the subjective feelings of satisfaction in and enjoyment of the product purchased. "However, the increasing personal anxiety and rising transaction costs associated with informing oneself about choices from an ever-larger set of goods on offer can still be 'incorporated' into a standard theory of consumer behavior" [42].

There are, however, at least two other reasons whose functions and meanings are somewhat outside the scope of research attention and are generally neglected even by the "standard" theories of consumer behavior. These are the issues of aspirations and hedonistic adaptation.

We examine the question of aspirations in the form of hopes and expectations of what we want to achieve in the area of consumer welfare. As a rule, these tend to increase in situations of high material security, accompanied by a proliferation of consumption opportunities as an inseparable feature of the rising standard of living in affluent societies. Furthermore, consumer aspirations are systematically and programmatically initiated by a dense network of information flows, images, and messages produced by the advertising industry's media apparatus and by advanced tools of integrated marketing communication, including the use of sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies. In the media-amplified hedonistic orientation of

#### *Consumer Culture and Abundance of Choices: Having More, Feeling Blue DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105607*

life, complete with examples and presentations of different variants and models of the attractiveness of lifestyles, the ethos of "a life of unlimited possibilities", "a world without limits", "a life of infinite opportunities" is awakened, which inevitably widens the gap between the reality (what we actually achieve) and the possibility (what we would like to achieve).

Lastly, there is the problem of (hedonistic) adaptation, which is closely related to the effects of increasing aspirations. Hedonistic adaptation, in the case of consumption, is what subsequently weakens the intensity of the initial enjoyment and the pleasure from the goods acquired (we find interesting similarities here with Weber-Fechner's law defining the relationship between psychic stimulus and perceived change—if the intensity of a stimulus grows by a geometric order of magnitude, then the intensity of the sensation grows by an arithmetic order of magnitude).

Behavioral economics here assumes that people are emotionally adaptive, finding support for this claim in Brickman and Campbell's psychological theory of hedonistic adaptation [51]. Thus, achieving a higher degree of consumer well-being may cause a certain fluctuation or deflection in the level of subjective happiness, however this returns to its original level after a certain period of time. Many consider that the achievement of a feeling of happiness lies in notions of fulfillment of aspirations, and yet once the goalposts are passed and these aspirations realized, they are quickly forgotten and cast into the past as unnecessary artifacts of one's own biography. This explains why there is such fervent pursuit of ever higher standards of living in affluent societies, why people endeavor to make their material comfort even more "comfortable" and convenience ever more "convenient". The past is always judged from the perspective of a higher aspirational level, and perhaps we too easily succumb to the illusion of the added value of well-being to a future from which perhaps too much is expected.

Hedonistic adaptation seems to operate at another level as well. Namely, consumers may exhibit a decreased ability to predict the chilling effect of adaptation due to higher expectations, also based on their own belief that their choice will be the "best" choice (depending on their ability to obtain, compare, and evaluate information). This contributes to the optimistic scenario of hoping that the choice will not bring disappointment, but rather longer-term feelings of satisfaction. However, these aspirations mean that the effects of hedonistic adaptation will weigh all the more heavily on this group of consumers. When one considers how quickly the costs associated with seeking the best price for a product are "amortized" over time as a result of hedonistic adaptation, their losses seem all the greater.
