In marketing companies infinite wisdom “they” have decided that consumers enjoy having many options when purchasing products and to a point they are correct. Like everyone else I too enjoy the option of having my cereal with or without almonds and 20 different air fresheners scents and their heavenly looking labels

But when someone is presented with TOO MANY options one can easily become confused, frustrated and almost negative.

For example, I am not a coffee drinker and neither is my roommate Derrek. During a Sunday afternoon shopping adventure today we decided that we have a coffee maker but no coffee was pretty much a waste and who knows occasionally a light night/early morning cup of coffee may be needed.

So we stumble to the coffee isle (also known as the “coffee warehouse”) and then begin our multi cultural, brand, flavor, aroma and bitterness journey into confused town -- population us bro.

Did the average person like to consume dark roast, or prefer a Columbian breakfast blend? Was French Vanilla preferred to more of an hazelnut coffee bean flavor? What brand of coffee did most prefer? (Dunkin Donuts was not an option) Should we get instant coffee in a box, or what about the vacuumed sealed brick o’ coffee? Would it keep longer if it was in a tin can?

After a few nauseating moments we started looking for “Plain Coffee” labels and then finally resorting to calling coffee drinkers to poll them to see what most people drank.

The whole adventure got me thinking about the whole less is more kind of mentality. Are there too many options in this world? Maybe that’s why people can be so picky about where when and what they eat/do? Has it bred us into a culture of elitists where we can’t agree on anything because there are too many slight variations of everything.

People tend to like to agree and associate with people of similar interests and a small portion of people like to stick out of the crowd just for the sake of being an asshole.

I think It’s nice when all your friends like the same kind of beer or prefer the same restaurants. It lumps everyone into groups of acceptance and people tend to like to belong to groups.

But in this world of 10,000 choices of flavors, formats, colors, shapes and sizes has me thinking that as a culture -- we may never agree on anything. Even if only on the tiniest of scales having similarity in interests’ leads to a more national sense of being, we are slowly going to lose that feeling.

I don’t know how this went from having too many choices in coffee affecting our patriotism, but god dammit -- I love granny smith apples and people who don’t are just asshats.