Twenty Four Jams
A tasting table in a California supermarket produced the most quoted finding in retail psychology, then spent twenty years being argued with. What survives the argument is still the best case for a short list.
In 2000 Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published a study built on a piece of fieldwork almost comically simple. At an upmarket grocery in Menlo Park they set up a tasting booth for jam. On some days the booth offered twenty four varieties. On others it offered six. They counted who stopped, and then they counted who bought.
The large display was better at attracting people: around sixty per cent of passing shoppers stopped, against forty per cent for the small one. The purchasing figures went the other way, and dramatically. Roughly thirty per cent of those who visited the six jam table went on to buy jam. Around three per cent of those who visited the twenty four jam table did. A display that pulled in half again as many people converted them at a tenth of the rate.
The finding travelled fast, partly because it was counterintuitive and partly because it arrived with a memorable name attached: the paradox of choice. It became a fixture of business books, conference talks and retail consultancy, usually stated far more confidently than the original authors ever stated it, and usually as a universal law: fewer options sell more.
That is where the honest account has to slow down, because the replication record is genuinely mixed. In 2010 Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Peter Todd published a meta analysis pulling together dozens of choice overload experiments and found a mean effect close to zero, with enormous variability between studies. Some found the overload effect strongly. Some found the opposite. If choice overload were a simple law, that is not the pattern you would see.
What the variability reveals is that the effect is real but conditional, and the conditions are now reasonably well described. Choice overload tends to appear when the chooser has no clearly formed preference beforehand, when the options are difficult to compare on a single dimension, when the decision carries some consequence, and when there is time pressure or no expert help available. It tends to disappear when the person already knows what they want, when the options are easy to rank, or when someone knowledgeable is standing there to narrow the field.
Read that list again from the point of view of somebody buying fragrance. They usually do not have a formed preference, because they cannot evaluate the product without wearing it for a day. The options are almost impossible to compare on any single axis. The purchase is not trivial in cost, and it is socially consequential, since it will be worn on a body in front of other people. And in most retail environments there is either no expert help or a salesperson whose advice the customer does not entirely trust. Every condition for overload is satisfied simultaneously. There is scarcely a product category more perfectly designed to paralyse a buyer.
The industry's answer has been to expand rather than reduce, and the numbers behind that decision are not irrational from the retailer's side. A large range covers more preference space, wins more shelf, catches more browsers, and lets a house claim relevance in every subcategory. The cost is invisible on a spreadsheet because it is a cost in decisions not made, customers who examined eleven bottles, felt tired, said they would think about it, and did not come back.
Which reframes what a small range actually is. A house that offers twenty one fragrances rather than two hundred has not merely failed to grow. It has performed the comparison work on the customer's behalf and absorbed the difficulty, which is precisely the job the six jam table was doing. Curation is not a decorative word for having less. It is the labour of deciding, done in advance by someone who knows the material, so the buyer does not have to do it standing up in a shop.
There is a second finding in this literature that gets less attention and matters more to anyone selling something people will live with. Larger assortments do not only reduce purchasing; they reduce satisfaction with what was eventually purchased. Having rejected twenty three alternatives, a buyer carries the shadow of those alternatives home. The jam is fine. The nagging sense that one of the others might have been better is also fine, and it never quite resolves. From a small range, the same jar arrives without competitors, and tastes better for it.
None of this argues for artificial scarcity or for pretending a limited range is a virtue when it is simply a limit. A short list only works if every item on it has earned its place and can be explained. Six jams sold well because six was enough to feel like a real choice while still being comprehensible. One jam is not curation, it is a shortage. The skill is in finding the number that is small enough to be navigable and large enough to contain an actual decision.
The practical form this takes is not really about the size of the catalogue at all. It is about how the range is presented. A well built house does not show a customer everything it makes. It asks two or three questions and then puts three bottles on the table, which is the tasting booth rebuilt properly: the full library exists behind the counter, and the person in front of the customer has already done the narrowing.
Twenty five years on, the jam study is quoted more often than it is understood, and the confident version of it, that less always sells more, is simply not supported. The defensible version is narrower and more useful. When a person cannot easily compare their options, has no settled preference, and no one is helping them, abundance stops being generous and starts being a burden. Fragrance meets that description almost perfectly, which is why the house with twenty one things and an opinion will keep outselling the wall with two hundred and none.