There is a specific tiredness that arrives in front of a full shelf. It is not indecision. It is closer to the suspicion that whatever you pick, a better version of it was two rows along, and that you will never know.
The study everybody quotes here is from 2000. A tasting table in a grocery store in Menlo Park, California, six jars of jam on some hours and twenty-four on others. The large display drew more people over. The small one sold roughly ten times as often.
It is a satisfying result, and it has been oversold. A meta-analysis of around fifty follow-up studies found no reliable effect overall. The finding did not die, it narrowed: it holds up mainly where the options are hard to tell apart and nobody has done any sorting on the shopper's behalf.
That last clause is the whole thing. The tiredness is not produced by the number of options. It is produced by the number of options and the absence of anyone willing to stand behind a recommendation.
Abundance moved the bill, it did not pay it
A century of retail was organised around putting more things in front of more people, and it worked so well that the shelf eventually became infinite. What it did not do was remove the cost of choosing. It transferred it. That cost now sits with the person doing the choosing, unpaid, at eleven at night, in a browser with nine tabs open.
Most of what gets sold as personalisation is a way of not paying that bill. A filter is not a recommendation. A ranking is not a judgement. Sorting by rating tells you what a large number of people tolerated, which is a different question from what is good, and the difference is exactly the part a brand is supposed to answer.
What an edit actually commits you to
William Morris, lecturing in Birmingham in 1880: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. It is quoted so often that it now reads as decorating advice. It is not. It is a rule about refusal, and refusal is the expensive half of any edit.
Carrying very little means the failures are yours. A long catalogue distributes blame beautifully: you chose the wrong one. A short one cannot do that. If the thing on the shelf is wrong, there is nobody else it could have been.
So the trade is legible. Fewer options, in exchange for somebody taking the consequences of them.
The version of this that is not generous
There is a way of doing curation that is really gatekeeping with better typography. We selected these, and by implication we would not have selected you. You can feel it in about a sentence, and it is why the word curated has decayed into meaning almost nothing.
The distinction is one word long. Did the filtering happen for you, or at you? From the outside both look like a short shelf.
We think it is detectable, and the tell is whether anyone will say plainly what got left out and why, or whether the absences are presented as taste and left unexplained.
Own fewer things, chosen well. Not because less is virtuous. Because somebody has to hold the work of choosing, and handing all of it to the buyer was never a service.