Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Choices, choices, choices

Wouldn’t it be nice if you go to let’s say…IKEA, and there would be just one thing of everything ? One mattress, one kind of mattress cover, one pillow, one of whatever. I’ll tell you : it would be heaven ! It would have saved me a total of five hours, spread over two Saturdays, of trying out mattress after mattress . It would save many an argument between couples. And it would simply be so much easier.
So this is the mental exercise I finally did the past weekend :
After once again doubting for more than an hour, and going back and forward between the three mattresses I liked best, I said to myself : OK, let’s just pretend you’re in a very small village somewhere in Africa. This mattress is the only one available. Would you be happy with it ? Yes. So, take it.
Three nights later, and I haven’t slept a wink on my « African » mattress.
It’s ten times harder than the one in the store (probably because each Saturday there are some thousand people bumping up and down on it like I did), and Mr. Sandman just refuses to visit it. So each night saw me crossing the hallway in the early hours of the morning, pillow under my arm, to the guest room, back to my old bed.
You might wonder : why haven’t you bought the same mattress again ? Ah, well, because IKEA (and other stores) not only think we should have too much choice, they also think that by changing their product range every so often, they give us the benefit of even more choice, spread out in time !
So at the moment, I’m stuck with these two options:
- keep on crossing the hallway around three in the morning
- continue my mental exercise : I’m in a small African village etc….

1 comment:

Res I(p)sa said...

I know the feeling; I had the same problem yesterday with sofas...