Decisions, Decisions

I make a lot of decisions--of varying degrees of importance. It requires a certain amount of energy to decide how to order my day, to line up my agenda, to keep track of where I'm supposed to be and when. I have to decide every day what's for dinner and how long it will take to prepare, and whether I have all the ingredients necessary to do so. Not momentous fare, I'll grant you, but coupled with the bigger life decisions we all make every day, every week, every year, it's enough. And that's my problem: decisions.

What good is a blog if you can't use it to exercise your pet peeves? Right. I went shopping today for staples--you know? Those things that are far cheaper at a big box store than at your local supermarket; things you don't buy that often, but have to have on hand: paper towels, toilet paper, soap, laundry detergent...that sort of stuff. Perhaps you see my gripe coming...

I am tired of spending 10-15 minutes in the paper goods aisle, trying to calculate the best deal in paper towels and/or toilet paper. It is impossible. I am not even a math-phobe. I actually like math, and enjoy challenging myself on mental calculations of price per ounce or cost per sheet. Weird, I know--and supermarkets have taken a lot of the fun out of it by doing the math for you and recording the unit price. However, even these unit price stickers fail utterly when it comes to toilet paper. No two packages are alike, and therefore, you can't compare them. Ultra-soft, Ultra-Strong, Huge rolls, Mega rolls, Single rolls, Double rolls, Triple rolls: 8 rolls equivalent to 16 rolls, 5 rolls equivalent to 15 rolls. Or so they say. Then when you factor in the fact that at least one of the packages is on sale, and the unit price stickers are applied randomly to shelves with no regard for what is actually ON the shelf--you have a recipe for total mathematical meltdown, right there in the Target aisle. It isn't pretty.

Paper towels are no better. Single strength, double-strength, select-a-size, single rolls, double rolls, quilted vs. non-quilted, printed vs. white, recycled vs. regular. And then, the various brands vs. the generic models. There is no hope of figuring out the best buy in this case.

I'd like to say that these are the only situations that baffle me, but I am overwhelmed by choices in the supermarket as often as in the Target aisle. It's not even the esoteric items that bother me: it's the everyday stuff. Bread. Milk. Orange juice. Canned tomatoes. WATER!!! All in infinite variety. Literally. I have seriously considered mapping out the dairy case: Fat-free, skim, reduced fat, low fat, whole, soy...and that's before you even think about the size of the container. Orange juice? It should just be orange juice, but no. We have to decide the level of pulp we want and what additives we want--calcium, perhaps? extra vitamin D? Bread comes in wheat, honey wheat, white, white whole wheat, not to mention the rye and pumpernickle options. And what ever happened to canned tomatoes? Now we have whole, diced, diced with onion, petite diced, Mexican style, Italian style, packed in juice, large, small, Roma, with chiles or without. Even water, for heaven's sake, comes with or without flavors, vitamins, or carbonation, with a pop-up or screw-down top, and from a variety of springs, mountain streams or filters.

I am all in favor of open markets and competition. I know it's good for business to build better mousetraps and to seek out and cater to new markets. But when carried to this extreme, product proliferation is driving me back to the time when I bought solely by brand name, and usually the brand name that I saw in my mother's pantry. Vermont Maid syrup, McCormick's teabags, Minute Maid orange juice, Quaker Oats. Distrustful of the myriad of products, I retreat toward the tried-and-true basic versions of the familiar. There's a reason I only buy Pepperidge Farm white sandwich bread. It's one less conscious decision I have to make.