Awesome Opening and the tyranny of choice

We have a new supermarket opening near school. It replaces an old supermarket that was torn down over the summer, I think. The students are amused at how fast it sprung up when the library down the road has been closed for renovations for almost 2 years. That's a credit to (a) the profit motive- a supermarket can't make money when it ain't there, and (b) the fact that it's easier to build something from scratch than to renovate an existing structure. In broad strokes, for instance, when you build from scratch you don't have to worry about the old roof falling on your head if you remove the wrong wall or column. Just sayin'.

Right now, it seems to be sitting there empty, but the parking lot is all paved, the lines are painted, and they even have those little huts for the lazy people who only want to partway return their shopping cart all set up. My guess is that all they need is groceries and/or people to work there, but I haven't seen a Grand Opening (is there any other kind?) date set.

Riffing on that for a sec, why are they still called grand openings? It seems awfully archaic. People don't use the word "grand" very much any more. I guess the new word for grand is "awesome." So get ready for the Awesome Opening on June 1 or whenever.

I'm curious to see what this place looks like. I had a chance to visit the new Wegman's supermarket in King of Prussia this week. It looks almost exactly like the one in Great Valley, which is to say it's huge and impressive both in the variety and quality of merchandise. here's a video I took, covering maybe half of 1% of the store. It's not that funny, but it gives you an idea of what we as shoppers deal with today.



I sometimes refer to this overabundance as the tyranny of choice. More choices are not always better. We think it gives us more options, but when there are too many types of the same item to choose from it becomes impossible to make a fully informed decision and you tend to fall back on the familiar just for safety's sake. How am I supposed to know which kind of whole wheat bread is the best? There are like 20 kinds and I'm not trying all of them. So I just keep buying the same kind I have for the past 10 years. I think that's interesting and not at all the reaction that food marketers are shooting for.