Life would be easier if everything you needed was sent to you in a box. A few months ago, I subscribed to Quinciple, a service that sends me a box of groceries once a week, which I pick up at a store a few blocks from my apartment. It saves me a little time and maybe a little money—but, mostly, it spares me from the so-called paradox of choice, or the paralysis that comes with having too many options while shopping. I have wasted hours of my life reading the fine print on cereal boxes, lipstick boxes, and sneaker boxes. I am forever looking for a reason to choose one loaf of bread or one brand of shampoo over countless others. (There is often no reason.) Once, I went to a grocery store to buy a soda and walked out, empty-handed, fifteen minutes later. Somewhere between the caffeine-free Diet Cherry Coke and the sixth flavor of seltzer, I forgot why I was even there at all.
Over the past three or four years, dozens of “subscription e-commerce” services have cropped up. These companies pick out and package virtually any kind of product imaginable—food, pet toys, clothes, condoms, cosmetics—into boxes that are delivered to hundreds of thousands of American doorsteps on a weekly or monthly basis. With Quinciple, I spend about forty dollars a week and get enough groceries—meat, vegetables, cheese, bread, and so on—to make two or three meals that each feed two people. Blue Apron, one of several larger competitors, sends you all the ingredients you need to make a recipes designed by name-brand chefs, for around ten dollars per meal per person.
The box trend is widely considered to have originated with BirchBox, a company that sends sample-sized cosmetics to women (in perfumed pink boxes) and to men (in odorless blue ones), in the hopes that they will take to the samples and buy full-sized versions through the company’s Web site. There’s also StitchFix, which sends customers an assortment of women’s clothing and accessories, for a “styling fee” of twenty dollars per box; clients pay for what they decide to keep—the average cost of an item is around fifty-five dollars—and return the rest in a pre-stamped package. According to CB Insights, a firm that compiles data about company funding, investors gave a hundred and ninety-five million dollars to these types of startups in 2012. Celebrities have even gotten into it: Ashton Kutcher has “curated” boxes for a site called Fancy, and Jessica Alba co-founded Honest, which sends subscribers packages of “clean-living” items, such as wipes and detergents. It is only a matter of time until Gwyneth Paltrow-branded green juice turns up in Manhattan cubicles.
In one sense, there’s nothing particularly novel about this model; wine-, book-, and fruit-of-the-month clubs have existed for years. But, instead of sending people new varieties of something they already know they like—say, romance novels or peaches—the newer services tend to sell people products that they might not think to buy otherwise, or that they may overlook on the shelf in an indecisive scramble to finish shopping. By effectively outsourcing buying decisions to someone else, these services attempt to help people avoid what Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, describes as the “misery-inducing tyranny” of the modern American marketplace. Too much choice puts us in a state of mind that’s unpleasant and unhealthy, Schwartz argues in his book “The Paradox of Choice.”
It’s almost surprising that entrepreneurs didn’t pick up on this problem sooner. The idea that too much choice can be dizzying seems so intuitive—in the modern-day United States, at least—that I asked Schwartz if it had been identified by philosophers or theorists of centuries past. “How could they even know? You can’t anticipate this!” he said. “This abundance is still very new. You can’t know its too much choice until it’s there in front of you.” Still, Schwartz said he’d encountered related ideas reading “Escape from Freedom” by the Marxist psychologist Erich Fromm, who, like Sartre and the existentialists, believed that total freedom of choice can make us feel hopeless.
Katrina Lake, the C.E.O. of StitchFix, said she is “obsessed” with “The Paradox of Choice”; it helped shape her idea for her business and was the first book she added to the company’s library in San Francisco. “As a C.E.O., I’m actually very decisive,” Lake said. “But my fiancé and I just bought an unfurnished condo, and I’ve spent hours and hours [thinking], What should this door handle be? What should the rug be? All the choices are just overwhelming.”
When I met Lake in New York in May, she was wearing a multicolored Tracy Reese pencil skirt (“vintage StitchFix, from last year”) and a boxy, black, quilted T-shirt by Alexander Wang top that she picked out herself. StitchFix was inspired in part by her sister’s closet—“she’s a buyer at Pucci and always looks really put together, so I would have her send me links to her outfits,” Lake explained—and as a way to fix some of the problems she ran into when shopping online. “The first version of e-commerce was amazing: You could get anything, even the Dior dress from seven seasons ago on eBay,” Lake told me. But as a result, “I’ll often put things in my [online] cart but so infrequently buy anything. And I think if these items ended up in my house I’d end up buying them.”
Lake conducted several studies to find the magic number that would get “time-starved women”—her target demographic—to want to buy one or two items of clothing without feeling stressed out by too many options (or bad fitting-room lighting). She ended with five items. Barry Schwartz finds this number reasonable: “You can’t send a dozen because you take the nightmare of being in a store into the living room,” he said.
That’s the number BirchBox came up with, too: Katia Beauchamp says that when she and her co-founder Hayley Barna met (also at Harvard Business School), they had discussed the concept of decision-making extensively. “Hayley studied behavioral economics, and we were always talking about the paradox of choice,” Beauchamp told me over the phone. “She’d walk into Sephora and turn around. She’d say, ‘I need a mascara, but I can’t deal with a thousand mascaras.’” And Matt Salzberg, the founder of Blue Apron, said that sending people specific materials to make a dish from scratch, like a recent shipment of blackened drum fish with cheddar cheese grits and a parsley salad, “goes hand in hand with the paradox of choice: there’s so much out there in the world, in terms of information, that people get overwhelmed.”
To be overwhelmed by choice isn’t, of course, the worst problem a person could have; better to have choice than to be too poor to have any choices at all. As Schwartz and his colleague Andrew Ward note, “when people have no choice, life is almost unbearable.” But for those who don’t have big problems to be solved, smaller ones will suffice. Schwartz says he’s not surprised by the existence, or the success, of the BirchBoxes of the world. Yet he has little use for them; he shops “with blinders on”—meaning he buys the same stuff over and over. If he were to choose a type of product to receive in a box every month, he would select electronics, because gadgets change so often that frequent replacements seem worthwhile. Still, he admitted, “I’m enormously resentful every time I get a new gadget, both with the process of figuring out what to get and figuring out how to use it.” Recently, he said, “My old BlackBerry was becoming unreliable, so I got a Samsung Galaxy or something like that. I got it because my wife already had one and could answer some of my questions. And all I wanted was for somebody I knew well to have already suffered so I wouldn’t have to suffer.”
Photograph: © AlexandraDost/Lumi Images/Corbis
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