If you’ve ever sat through a business presentation, there’s a decent chance somebody told you about the jam study.
In 2000, two psychologists set up a tasting table at an upscale grocery store in California. Some days the table had 24 kinds of jam. Other days it had 6.
The big display pulled in more people. About 60 percent of shoppers who passed it stopped to taste, compared to about 40 percent at the small one. But when it came time to buy, roughly 3 percent of the big-table crowd bought jam. At the small table, it was close to 30 percent.
Ten times the sales with a quarter of the options. Too many choices, the story goes, and people freeze up and walk away.
It’s a great story. I’ve told it myself.
Then I remembered I used to run a pizza place
I managed at Domino’s. If too many choices made people walk away, pizza places would have gone out of business decades ago. Crusts, sauces, cheeses, a whole board of toppings, half-and-half pizzas. People navigate that every single night.
Here’s what I actually saw behind the counter.
Nearly every pizza had pepperoni on it. Next was sausage. Then mushrooms. Those were the big three.
The fourth topping? Whatever you wanted it to be. Ham with pineapple. Philly steak, which people loved. Green peppers. That’s the only place where everybody’s choices went all over the map.
But if you ordered one or two toppings, it was pepperoni and sausage. Three deep, add mushrooms. Then all the rest.
Crusts were even easier. I could usually guess before you said it. Got kids? Deep dish. Just ordering pizza for the sake of pizza? Hand tossed. Trying to be a little health conscious? Thin crust.
On paper, that menu allowed a ridiculous number of combinations. Easily millions. And almost everybody ordered the same handful of things, while honestly believing their order was unique and complicated.
We trained people to take a phone order in about a minute, because we already knew how the call would go.
“What are your specials?”
Here are three.
They’d order whichever one we suggested. Then: “Wait, can I add another pizza?”
Sure.
The special wasn’t special. Everybody ordered it like it was pumpkin spice season at Starbucks.
So which is it? Do options scare people off, or not?
The part of the story nobody tells
Other researchers tried to repeat the jam study. Many of them couldn’t get the same result. One group ran a jam test in a German supermarket and found no effect at all.
In 2010, a team pulled together about fifty choice-overload experiments and looked at all of them at once. The average effect of adding more options came out close to zero. Sometimes more choices hurt sales. Sometimes they helped. Most of the time they didn’t matter much.
A later review found the effect does show up, but only under certain conditions. People freeze when they don’t already know what they like, when the options are hard to compare, and when the decision feels complicated.
That explains the pizza
Most people calling a pizza place already know what they like. They decided on pepperoni years ago. The menu is long, but the decision is short.
And the ones who don’t know? They do exactly what my callers did. They ask for the specials and let somebody else narrow it down to three. The specials were our version of the six-jam table.
Exotic jams are the opposite. Nobody walks in with a lifelong opinion about kiwi-lime marmalade. Twenty-four unfamiliar flavors with no clear way to compare them? That’s when people shrug and leave.
So the lesson isn’t “fewer choices.” It’s closer to this. If people don’t know what they want yet, give them a short list. If they already know, get out of the way.
The real test: what’s for dinner?
Ask two people where they want to eat and watch the choice-overload research play out live.
When Amber and I started dating, she would not make a decision about where to eat. Ever.
So we ate a lot of Whataburger.
That was the penalty. Amber does not like Whataburger. Her indecision counted as a vote, and the vote went to me.
Men, as a rule, will eat whatever you put in front of them. Ask any wife from three generations ago. Her husband walked in, asked what’s for dinner, and dinner was whatever she’d decided. Nobody went around the table taking a poll.
Now that I have kids, I may have to bring the Whataburger rule back.
Because nobody in that car is overwhelmed by too many restaurants. They just haven’t decided what they like today. Give them two options instead of “anywhere,” and somehow dinner happens.
Or don’t, and enjoy your burger.
More rabbit holes: Why a Signature Can Make Something Priceless and The Game: Understanding the Rules and Origins.
There’s always a story under the story.
If this one stuck with you, I’ll send the next one straight to your inbox.