The Paradox of Choice: How Our Shopping Habits Create Waste

We are kind of living in the ideal world, where we are surrounded by various products and services that possess the potential to fulfill our daily needs. Whether it’s ordering something trivial that would reach our doorstep within minutes (thanks to the micro e-commerce platforms), or if it is about ordering fashion products and returning if that doesn’t suit the trend or looks outdated. It is not only about the digital world purchases; the conundrum lies in the physical world purchases as well.

We all are familiar with multiple-choice questions right? At the minimum, we get 2 options to choose from, but when the list of options increases to 5 or more, we find it difficult to choose the right answer, which results in a paradox of choice. We are hit by this paradox in our real life as well. The abundant options available to us to choose from make it difficult for us to make the right decisions as a consumer. And this directly impacts the environment significantly increasing the waste.

Impulse purchase and decision fatigue

Imagine you visit a supermarket, and you need to buy a protein powder, in the aisle, you will encounter many different options, different brands, showcasing different benefits of the product, sometimes different flavors also enough to put you in the dilemma of which one to buy. Being a consumer, these factors are enough to create decision fatigue, which is a mental exhaustion that occurs when we are exposed to too many choices.

This results in impulse buying rather than making informed decisions, eventually leading us to be part of unsustainable choices of buying. As we choose a product which is not right for us, we tend to discard the product and buy another again, without even the prior product getting fully used. This happens in beauty products mostly, where we try to convince ourselves that the chosen product if it turns out to be not for us, must be discarded as using the wrong product might affect our skin. These types of decisions generate extra landfill waste, waste of packaging materials, fuel, energy, and all other associated things that are responsible for the product reaching your place.

The Psychological Trap of Planned Obsolescence

The fashion industry is cruel, one of the industries that is negligent and ignorant about the environment’s health as a whole. The concept of “fast fashion” where the industry produces trending clothes at low prices alluring the consumer base by creating FOMO and urgency. Consumers fail to resist themselves and end up buying way more than what their wardrobes may accommodate.

The psychology of planned obsolescence is also played by fashion industry experts, who design products and fill the market with the concept that these have a limited life span, and must be purchased before it is out of stock. Consumers then tend to buy rapidly. This cycle of purchasing, then discarding, and then buying again, generates huge waste not only after the discarding of the textile material is done, but also, during mass production of the fast fashion products, huge water consumption takes place. So, it is a disaster from both ends.

How can we become sustainable consumers?

Can we break this cycle? What needs to be done to move out of the paradox? Well, here are a few ways I find to be useful:

• Adapting to Minimalism – Quality is always better than quantity. It would be a sound decision to buy durable and long-lasting products rather than buying those that don’t have longevity. This will eventually reduce waste generation and somehow will help us buy less and spend less at the same time.

• Supporting sustainable brands – Having the power to buy makes you a consumer, but knowing what you are buying makes you a wise consumer. Look at companies and brands that use sustainable practices to manufacture their products, do research about them, understand their processes, and get to know about their certifications. By supporting these brands, you are indirectly helping the environment.

• Thrift Store concept – Thrift stores are sustainable, responsible, and a conscious choice toward the environment. As it promotes reduced wastage by reusing, it lowers carbon emissions as well. In India thrift stores are now not an uncommon thing, if you search you might end up taking a step towards becoming a sustainable consumer.

• Planning the purchases – Impulse buying is a serious curse to the money in your pocket, on the other hand, it is a boon for businesses. Resist yourself from buying things you will not need, focussing and going by the shopping list you have made before coming to the supermarket will help you spend a lot less than not having a list at all.

• Choosing the product – You can only make sound buying decisions if you do your research well before buying the product. Get to know which product, flavor, or brand will suffice your needs. Standing in front of the aisle will lead to decision fatigue.

• Try to avoid quick commerce – We know how Blink It and Zepto promise to bring things at lightning speed, but with this, the promise to take care of the environment turns out to be void. Due to these apps, we spend more than the market price, instead of walking a minute to buy groceries we are ready to pay a surged delivery charge, and we also sometimes end up ordering more than once in a single day.

Adapting to mindful shopping habits is not a one-day change, but rather a gradual practice. We can overcome the trap, the paradox, the dark psychology those businesses and industries play, only by asking the question “Do I need…”. This question will cut off almost anything we buy that restricts us from moving toward a sustainable future. As the great Mahatma Gandhi also said once “The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed” So cheers to him, and to us to start taking our tiny responsible steps toward sustainability.