We live in an age of abundance: more information, more options, more products, more channels, more noise. On the surface, this abundance appears to be a gift—greater access, freedom, and personalization. But beneath that promise lies a growing tension: complexity fatigue.
Choice as No Choice
Consumers are surrounded by choice, and increasingly exhausted by it. They download dozens of apps but use only a handful. They fill closets with clothing but rotate through the same limited number of familiar pieces. They buy groceries with good intentions, only to discard a third of what they bring home. They scroll endlessly, browse extensively, and yet often procrastinate before committing to a decision.
These are not isolated behaviors. They are signals. Signals that challenge the long-held retail assumption that more choice equates to more value. These signals also suggest that the future of retail is not about expanding selection endlessly, but about refining it intentionally. These are signals that point toward a deliberate focus on curation.
Is customer value in retail unlimited choice and abundance? And the answer is: Curation wins loyalty and relevance, aligns customers’ wants and needs, and diminishes complexity fatigue.
Complexity Fatigue
The average smartphone today holds roughly 80 installed apps. Yet only about nine are used daily, and fewer than half of those 80 are used even once a month. The rest sit dormant, available and irrelevant. Consumers don’t delete them because they no longer provide value, but because it requires too much effort. Whether busy, lazy, or overwhelmed, we all naturally seek the path of least resistance.
The same overabundance issue appears at home. The average American single-family house now exceeds 2,100 square feet, yet daily life typically takes place in a small fraction of that space. Entire rooms exist only for occasional use. Space is abundant; its utility is not.
Closets tell a similar story. Studies consistently show that people regularly wear only 50 to 60 percent of the clothing they own. The rest sits untouched. Many garments are worn fewer than ten times before being discarded, oftentimes with regret. The flip side is the upcycling apparel market, but it still doesn’t solve the habit of over-purchasing.
Often, aspirational buying doesn’t align with real behavior. Across categories, ownership exceeds usage and wants exceed needs. This is a mismatch between human psychological reward-driven yearnings and the conventional assumption that more is always better.
What Research Has Been Telling Us for Years
This wants and needs tension is nothing new. Behavioral science has been studying it for decades. One of the most cited examples is the well-known “jam study,” conducted by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper. When shoppers were presented with 24 varieties of jam, they were more likely to stop and sample. On the other hand, shoppers presented with just six varieties were far more likely to stop and make a purchase.
That finding became a cornerstone of what later came to be known as the “paradox of choice,” a concept explored extensively by psychologist Barry Schwartz. His research demonstrated that excessive choice increases anxiety, regret, and decision paralysis. People fear making the wrong choice, so they delay making any choice at all. Subsequent studies reinforced this across many categories: retirement plans, consumer electronics, apparel, and even healthcare decisions. When options proliferate beyond a manageable threshold, satisfaction declines, confidence erodes, and conversion is sidelined. For years, marketers and the CPG industry have been aware of this research, but too often they continue to march in the opposite direction.
The Endless Aisle
Digital commerce unlocked the paradox of choice on steroids. The infinite shelf space of endless digital aisles became a competitive advantage. More SKUs delivered a broader reach and theoretically higher odds of appealing to individual preferences. For a time, this worked. Search was an exercise in discovery filtered by algorithms that promised personal preference relevance at scale.
But scale brought its own problems. As assortments ballooned, discovery became more opaque. Search results expanded beyond comprehension. Comparison shopping turned into an exercise in fatigue with cart abandonment and surging returns. Too much choice transformed into supply chain nightmares. Add to that, a significant percentage of shoppers now cite “too many options” as a reason for abandoning purchases, particularly in categories like apparel, beauty, and consumer electronics. What was once framed as an empowerment tool has increasingly become a burden. The conversation requires a shift away from “endless aisles” to curating “best aisles.” The goal is to no longer offer everything, but rather to offer the right things, replacing maximum choice with meaningful choice.
Technology Is a Steward, not a Substitute
While many frame AI and human curation as a tug-of-war, the real opportunity lies in partnership and harmony. Technology serves as a powerful retail steward—managing redundancy, detecting assortment drift, and supporting complexity at scale—but it cannot decide what matters. There is a critical distinction: AI and predictive analytics excel at forecasting what might happen based on the past. But the past is not always a prelude to the present, and often what worked in the past is no guarantee of what will work in the present. When it comes to curation, default prediction is high risk. The pathway to innovation isn’t to simply anticipate trends; it is to set them. This requires the human expertise—instinct, cultural nuance, and emotional drivers—that dashboards cannot replicate. Curation is a retailer’s foundational skill; waiting for a perfect technology to streamline that process is an abdication of leadership. Technology and specifically AI should be viewed as a partner to human judgment, with tech as a tool, not a proxy for human beings.
The Human Touch
Perhaps most importantly, curation re-humanizes retail. Historically, retail thrived on trust. Loyal shoppers return not for endless choices, but because the selection makes sense. The modern practice of curation is supported by data, scaled by technology, and guided by human judgment. The irony is self-evident. When consumers have access to everything, they increasingly reward those who offer fewer choices, provided that fewer is better. Healthy retail will not be decided by those who carry the most. It will be led by deft curation, because in a world overwhelmed by abundance, relevance wins.
The implications are clear. Retailers that continue to compete primarily on product breadth risk becoming background noise. Availability doesn’t equate to value. Curation isn’t a niche strategy reserved for luxury brands or personal shoppers. It is becoming table stakes for relevance in a crowded, fatigued marketplace.
