The Paradox of Choice Shops for a Birthday Card

July 31, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is having a large variety of items to choose from helpful for making a decision? Or, as the paradox of choice would have it, do all those options keep us from deciding and then, when we do finally make up our mind, leave us less satisfied with our choice?

In the previous post, I speculated that it depends on how deeply our ego is sunk in the thing we’re choosing. The same object may have a vastly different meaning to different people. When it comes to shopping, those differences are often strongly rooted in gender roles.

I once heard a marketing expert explain that in a greeting card store, men and women follow much different stage directions. Women will look at nearly every card in the category trying to find the absolutely right one. Men look only until they find one that seems OK, and that’s the one they buy.  It’s the same now on the Internet. Scribbler, an online British card company found that men spent about six minutes online choosing a card. Women averaged 15 minutes.

Men would probably be happier with a small number of cards to choose from. But a woman who finds only a few cards to choose from might extend her search to another store or website in order to find the perfect card. Greeting cards are not a guy thing.* Or as Emily West puts it in an article in Feminist Media Studies (here), “For many women, greeting card communication is part of a feminized habitus that includes kinship work as well as routine provisioning for the household. For men, taking an interest in greeting cards can seem like discrediting behavior for heterosexual masculinity.”

In other words, regardless of what is actually printed on the greeting card, the real message is that the giver and receiver are connected socially and emotionally. For many women, competence in that sphere matters a lot for their sense of self. Men, not so much.**

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* Eighty percent of all greeting cards are bought by women.

** It always strikes me as ironic that although greeting cards signify this personal connection, we turn to an unknown and distant stranger, some Hallmark-hired Cyrano, to put these feelings into words (the “sentiment” as it’s known in the card biz).