Consumer Culture and Abundance of Choices: Having More, Feeling Blue

Abstract

The defining feature of contemporary consumer culture is the escalation of consumption opportunities and the expanding space for choice. An unbridled and unrestricted range of products is part of material prosperity, rising living standards, and emancipation of human freedoms. The growing demands for constant consumer decision-making in an increasingly opaque environment of potential targets of choice exposes consumers to the risk of procrastination, passivity, and resignation, as well as psychological discomfort. The goal here is to contribute to theories of consumer behavior in the context of the psychological experience of choice under the conditions of the accelerated quantity of consumption volumes against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. While conventional offline shopping was drastically curtailed during the coronavirus crisis, freedom of consumer choice was maintained despite many proclamations to the contrary. I seek to provide support to the claim that freedom of consumer choice was maintained and often amplified during the pandemic in the online virtual environment of digital commerce formats. Freedom of consumer choice has merely been transformed into a horizontal level of application by the relatively rapid and fluid conversion of market activities into the cyberspace of a growing number of e-stores and online supermarkets, unconstrained by the physical space of shelves and counters.

1. Introduction

The goal in this chapter is to contribute to theories of consumer behavior in the context of the psychological experience of choice under the conditions of an explosive and expansive sphere of consumption opportunities against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this pandemic, shopping has become much more intensely concentrated in the online virtual environment consisting of digital formats of commercial transactions, and the space of choice for consumers in that online environment has expanded extensively. During the coronavirus crisis, the volume of e-commerce sites offering an assortment of products grew rapidly and their overall activity increased rapidly [1]. Not only did the number of e-shops and online supermarkets increase, but at the same time the sales offering of individual retailers also grew, no longer limited by the physical space of shelves and counters. “Digital tools enable reduced searching costs and provide instant access to a much wider variety of products and services…” [2]. It is this fact of extending the range of shopping options within the digitized formats of eshops that positively contributed during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensuring the availability of requisite supplies and the possibility of their convenient transport directly to homes, during both personal quarantines and area lockdowns. On the other hand, however, in such a situation of abundant choices, what is known as the Schwartz paradox of choice comes into play [3]. Schwartz’s basic thesis assumes that an overabundance of choices contributes to a decrease in happiness and reduces customers’ motivation to buy. This idea is echoed by other authors. “Not only does offering more options lead to higher costs for the company, larger assortments often lead to lower probability of purchase and decreased satisfaction due to choice overload” [4]. Kinjo and Ebina [5] developed a proprietary mathematical model to calculate the optimal quantity of products offered by retailers in order to maximize sales, depending on the size of customers’ invested costs in product selection. These authors confirm the thesis that markets in the real world and in cyberspace should adapt to a moderately sized product offering, which would lead not only to higher sales but also to much more favorable psychological effects on customer behavior. “Other studies show that people actually experience the greatest satisfaction when choosing from intermediate set of choices, not too small and not too big” [6]. More recently, the problem of the paradox of choice has been addressed at the meta-analytic level of interdisciplinary research in the behavioral and social sciences by Zhang and Xu [7]. In the process they arrived at the surprising finding of a high degree of inconsistency in academic results at both the theoretical and empirical levels of research. In doing so, they applied their own mathematical analysis and extensive simulation theories.

COVID-19 significantly reduced the possibilities of conventional offline shopping and limited the volumes of product offerings for some time [2]. However, business transactions moved rapidly to the online environment and supply chains quickly adapted to the indicators of consumer market demand [8]. The temporary problem of lack of product supply due to the reduction of offline shopping was quickly resolved by the rapid conversion to online sales [9]. Thus, COVID-19 did not significantly restrict freedom of consumer choice, but merely triggered its horizontal transformation and shifted its application to the digitalized sphere of shopping. The paradox of choice, originally elaborated by Schwartz [3] and developed in various contexts by a number of other authors [10, 11, 12], applied universally even in the era of the coronavirus crisis, inaccurately equated with the drastic reduction of consumer freedom of choice and the associated frustration of customers.

In this context, I will expose and evaluate the more general and apparently universally operating foci of tension and conflict generated in an environment of an increasingly dense network of consumption opportunities, in which the decisions of actors and the outcomes of choices are confronted with negative subjective experiences of regret, anxiety, or disappointment. Last, I will identify and sequentially explain the main sources reducing satisfaction from consumer choices made in an environment of abundant opportunities. I will focus on the circumstances of the influence of information, aspirations, and hedonistic adaptation as potential sources of their psychological discomfort. These are firmly integrated in the sphere of consumer decisions yet, I presume, are only minimally reflected in the everyday activities of consumers.

2. Methods

This chapter presents a theoretical study based on critical reflection on the discourse regarding changing consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. The method used to achieve the stated objectives consisted of critical literature review, comparative analysis, and meta-analytical evaluation of selected review and empirical studies aimed at understanding changes in consumer culture and consumer behavior. The critical literature review mainly reflects studies with a sociological, behavioral economic, social psychological, psychological, and partly anthropological focus. At the same time, more detailed attention has been devoted to a critical review of sociological studies from 2020 to 2022 referencing current transformations of consumer behavior during the time of the COVID-19 crisis. Relevant scholarly sources were identified using the ProQuest and ProquestEbooks databases. The methodological framework is built on an attempt to create a theoretical platform of arguments, insights, critical perspectives, and opinions, challenging some stereotypically accepted conceptions of consumer decision-making and freedom of consumer choice in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter is intended to prompt future scholarly efforts to empirically investigate patterns of consumption behavior internalized during the COVID-19 crisis and the dynamics of their further strengthening or, conversely, weakening in the post-COVID period. The theoretical conclusions that follow can be developed and further verified through experimental studies and quantitative and qualitative research methods.

3. Sociological reflection on the transformation of consumer behavior against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic

Consumption levels fell by around 25% in some European countries (e.g. UK, Spain, Italy, and France) during the coronavirus crisis, while in the USA a 10% drop in consumption was recorded during this period [13]. Over the last 2 years, the COVID-19 pandemic has produced not only dramatic economic but also psychosocial effects, transforming many parameters of consumption behavior and more general lifestyle standards [14]. “Among the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen the closing of shops and other business for months. Consumers have avoided public places, stores, and cultural events, even when such establishments were open. As a result, consumers began to change their purchasing behaviors and habits in a sustainable way” [15].

There is now a relatively rich empirical record from 2020 and 2021 documenting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as a source of significant changes in consumer decision-making, shopping patterns, and other characteristics, traits, and manifestations of people’s lifestyles. Silva et al. [16] conducted a detailed review of published scientific studies in journals indexed in the WOS and Scopus databases between 2020 and 2021 with the common research topic of changes in consumer behavior and consumption patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study authors identified a total of 416 relevant articles according to the defined selection criteria (87 from 2021 and 329 from 2020). Based on bibliometric, thematic, and content analysis, the authors identified 7 main topical units referencing lifestyle changes related to consumption behavior during the coronavirus crisis: Changes in consumer behavior; Coping with the lockdowns; Information seeking and sharing; Psychological effects; Addictive behavior; Changes in food consumption; Panic buying and hoarding behavior [16]. Interesting data was also provided by their analysis of the keywords of the studies examined, through which the authors identified three main clusters. In this context of examining the ambivalent nature of proliferation of consumer choices, the following frequently occurring keywords in these clusters are relevant: Consumers; Decision-making; Information-seeking behavior; Stress [16]. In this study, the authors simultaneously addressed the question of other topics and issues that should be explored in greater detail in the context of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on changes in consumption behavior. One such key question is the problem of consumer choice and strategies for making purchasing decisions.

An even more extensive theoretical study was conducted by Yin, Yu, and Xu [17] on a robust sample of academic studies published between 1981 and 2021 that report on consumer behavior issues. They analyzed very rich research material, which enabled them to reveal changes in consumption behavior in modern societies over the relatively long time frame of the last decades. The authors point out that the COVID-19 pandemic marked an unexpected, rapid step change in lifestyle and consumption changes. According to their analysis of secondary data, the most significant changes in consumption behavior will occur in the sphere of an increased preference for online shopping or increased interest in healthy foods. They also highlight the importance of the more intensive mix of online and offline commerce, which allows consumers to shop more seamlessly and conveniently from anywhere and at any time. In the context of psychological effects during the coronavirus crisis, other authors confirm the increase in feelings of anxiety and insecurity that stems from online panic shopping and stockpiling, especially of food [18].

A similar meta-analysis was conducted by Smith and Machová [19], who analyzed empirical data from the research agencies Ipsos, KPMG, Roland Berger and Potloc, Salesforce, Worldpay/FIS, and YouGov and reported on actual changes in consumer behavior and attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors systematize the analyzed data to identify the main foci of changes in people’s lifestyles and daily practices, including consumption behavior, and describe their key attributes [19]. It is confirmed here that the introduction of restrictive measures in the form of home quarantines and blanket lockdowns has produced dramatic social and economic effects in the populations studied, including a fundamental transformation of consumption practices. Consumer activities have shifted massively to virtual environments, with an increased preference for digital shopping via mobile devices and much greater use of online supermarket delivery apps. It has become clear that shoppers have become much more discerning in their product selection and have reorganized their purchasing decision-making strategies in the course of online shopping. It can be assumed that one of the reasons for this change may be that customers are confronted with a concentration of larger volumes of goods and services in the virtual shopping environment. It is here that potentialities complicating the decision-making process and choice have most likely been amplified for the segment of the population that had been accustomed to the conditions of conventional shopping with a more limited range of offerings in the period before the coronavirus crisis.

Šimić and Pap [13] empirically observed changes in consumption behavior during the coronavirus crisis in Croatia within the Generation Z population, whose members are often referred to as “digital natives”. Based on a quantitative data analysis conducted on a sample of 422 respondents, they showed that the consumption behavior of Generation Z during the coronavirus crisis led to much more stockpiling and overbuying. At the same time, they typically concentrated their consumption activities ever more frequently online, which became a global trend during the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet there was no correlation between changes in consumption behavior and perceived quality of life, which the study authors explain by the fact that for Generation Z, online shopping was already the norm in the pre-COVID-19 era, and as such the reduction in physical shopping options was not perceived negatively as a factor reducing their quality of life. The findings of an empirical study by Wang and Na [20] conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in three Chinese cities confirm that panic shopping and hoarding, especially of food, is a significant manifestation of similar crises, triggering growing feelings of insecurity and fear of the future. Hesham, Riadh, and Sihem [15] empirically demonstrate statistical associations between age and gender moderating specific changes in consumption behavior in a sample of 360 respondents in Saudi Arabia. According to their findings, interest in healthy foods increased sharply during the coronavirus crisis, especially among women and the elderly population, who were observed to have higher levels of anxiety and psychological distress during the pandemic. Gupta, Nair, and Radhakrishnan [21] offer similar empirical conclusions by looking at changes in consumption behavior in India. There, the COVID-19 pandemic initiated panic and impulse buying and the need to stockpile food. Veselovská, Závadský, and Bartková [22] conducted a sociological investigation on a representative sample of the Slovak population to identify and explain the main factors influencing changes in consumption behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing empirical data, they reach similar conclusions as other authors [23], that in times of crisis, the rate of consumption increases and the allocation of financial resources to savings or longer-term investments decreases. At the same time, the authors of the Slovak study stressed that hygiene/epidemiological restrictions and the related restriction of social interactions have significantly influenced people’s mentality, reorganized daily routines and motivations for action, and, last but not least, modified consumption patterns in terms of a transition to digital shopping formats, which was more evident in the female population than in the male population. A number of other similarly focused empirical and theoretical studies are emerging in the early months of 2022.

4. The ambivalence of freedom of choice

In post-industrial societies, the values of material well-being and rising living standards are closely intertwined with the notion of simultaneously maximizing people’s individual freedoms [3]. In other words, existential security and its further strengthening and affirmation in a spiral of increasing abundance should be echoed in parallel at a similarly accelerated and progressive existential level in terms of the emancipation of human freedoms. An integral part of such freedoms is the fulfillment of the premise of a proliferation of choices and decisions in a variety of life situations. It is therefore true that the greater the plurality of choice in each individual decision-making situation, the more intense the personal freedoms people achieve. It should be added that the more freedoms there are, the greater the well-being.

An unbridled offering of products is intended to liberate and emancipate consumers in their ability to make free and authentic choices. In particular, some optimistic scenarios attribute to technological innovation an important function in the creation of abundance in the sense of the ever more voluminous generation of value from fewer resources, but also abundance represented by a more robust selection and variety of options in the areas of everyday consumption, education, and health [24].

There is no doubt that significant expansion of choice as one of the pillars of emancipation of individual freedoms is one of the defining features of the consumer culture of late modern societies. According to Lury [25], it is precisely the trend of accelerated growth in the quantity of types and classes of contemporary goods and the contemporary proliferation of sales and purchasing platforms that forms part of the fundamental parameters of contemporary consumer culture of societal well-being. The expansion of consumption opportunities is fundamentally driven by the increasingly massive conversion of conventional product offerings traditionally determined by the physical context of points of sale, dependent on the personal interactions of sellers and buyers, into the virtual environment of digitized shopping. The online environment of consumer activities is not limited by the space or physical capacity of points of sale and shelves. On the contrary, the virtual shopping environment accelerates the quantitative potential of the assortment of goods on offer and the variability in the selection of types and classes of different products. The digitalization of shopping formats not only contributes to an increase in the quantitative volume of product and service choices, but also to a more creative and personalized shopping experience overall. Thus, consumers are reorganizing their life standards and consumption preferences as a result of the introduction of the technological innovations of digitized shopping [19].

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed substantially to the speed of these changes, accelerated by the reorganization of consumer shopping patterns and the redefinition of consumption behavior. Everyday life was significantly transformed as a result of widespread lockdowns and home quarantines, as were routine consumer activities. Thus, opportunities for socially interactive individual shopping were reduced, leading to a massive shift of product offerings and sales to online virtual environments [26]. The digitalization of shopping formats has thus directly and indirectly influenced customers’ consumption habits and decision-making strategies [27].

As such, the empirically identified and explicitly described causes of changes in consumption behavior thus undoubtedly include the fact of the forced conversion of conventional shopping to the virtual environment, where the confrontation of customers with the abundance of offerings was intensified and had essentially no other alternative. We can also see changes in the decision-making strategies of customers according to a meta-analysis of empirical data from various reputable public opinion research agencies that tracked various parameters of changes in consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Consumer decision-making and behavior change have rapidly adapted based on a range of individual and contextual characteristics” [19]. At the same time, there should also be evidence of higher levels of customer procrastination and even more demanding product selection criteria from shoppers.

In the spirit of rational choice theory, this is an uncomplicated situation, since every concrete decision and choice made is the result of a stable and reliably functioning hierarchy of the social actor’s priorities and preferences of a social actor, who rationally applies such a system in every similar situation requiring an act of choice, regardless of the number of options needing to be compared and evaluated with each other as part of the implementation of the choice [28].

According to other behavioral economic studies, the conditions of such shopping are not only potentially more creative, varied, and comfortable, but also much more psychologically complicated and even reduce the level of positive feelings about shopping. Masatlioglu and Suleymanova [29] for example, address questions related to the adequate decision-making strategies of consumers and the dangers of procrastination or shopping resignation under the conditions of a dense network of product offerings that should psychologically facilitate choice and practically optimize its outcome. After all, consumers are confronted with numerous psychological and cognitively distorting elements of human thought [30]. While consumers seek to maximize their own utility and assume that their choices in acts of decision-making will lead to this maximization, the outcomes of choice often do not produce the expected effects. In fact, the little-considered reality of the ambivalent nature of consumer culture, sometimes referred to and interpreted as the “culture of overchoice” [31], fundamentally casts doubt on optimistic scenarios referencing theses of increasing consumer comfort and growing feelings of freedom, independence, authenticity, and pleasure resulting from accelerating consumer product choices [24], as assumed, for example, by economic theories of rational choice [32]. While acts of decision-making in an environment of growing choices increase the potential to achieve objectively better, i.e., higher quality, more useful, or more advantageous outcomes, they often instead paradoxically awaken feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, internal tension, disappointment, remorse, or regret [33, 34]. The thesis of a relationship between the escalation of the range of options, the growth of demands for continuous decision-making, and the increasing level of consumer dissatisfaction is also considered at a more general level by other authors [35, 36, 37].

5. Why less can be more

In the conditions of a performance consumer society, active participation in consumption is an indicator of individual success, prestige, and recognition [38]. The function of consumption is simultaneously to construct and reconstruct identities and to model social roles. It is becoming a source of self-reflection and the formation and sharing of symbolic worlds [39]. The consumer culture of affluent societies is equated with a culture of “many opportunities”, providing ever greater volumes of choices and consumption goals in an expanding variety of product offerings. “There are millions of products available on store shelves nowadays” [40]. These conditions then contribute to a conviction that individual freedoms are continually increasing, both in the sphere of the material consumption of shopping itself, and in the dimension of symbolic values and signs, achieved and (re-)defined through different models of consumption behavior.

Consumer culture is characterized by an ambivalent nature. The more diverse and voluminous offering of choices on one hand raises optimistic expectations of expanding individual freedom and independence, while on the other hand it leads to high demands for individual responsibility in making choices and experiencing the outcomes of choices. According to some authors, this very fact leads to negative effects in the form of psychological discomfort, when the degree of inner anxiety and uncertainty and feelings of self-defeat increase as a result of a more complex decision-making process in an environment of many opportunities. Motivations grow stronger to postpone the decision or completely resign from making a choice [41]. On the contrary, similar experiences of negative emotions in the form of remorse and dissatisfaction might not occur in conditions of limited choices. In fact, the outcome of a choice in a situation of limited choices significantly relativizes the feeling of personal responsibility. Each individual decision takes place against a background of minimized consumer choice, and responsibility for the outcome in a context of limited choice can be at least partially shifted to the external circumstances of the system. For example, until the late 1980s, the range of consumer goods in socialist Czechoslovakia was dramatically reduced as the result of its centrally planned state economy to such an extent that something like the psychological discomfort of consumer choice was almost unknown. In such a world, part of the personal responsibility for choices made was thus transferred to an anonymous system of political, economic, cultural, or social parameters of society. Thus, every disadvantageous decision or bad choice need not be experienced as a personal failure. In contrast, a world of hypertrophy of opportunity delegates this responsibility strictly to individuals, who have to deal with the consequences of their own decisions independently. This has not ceased to be the case even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when freedom of consumer choice was preserved in spite of certain expectations and intensively exercised in the online environment of digital shopping formats. For some types of products in particular, freedom of choice was maintained and, in some cases, even enhanced due to the virtual environment.

Feelings of psychological discomfort under conditions of abundant choice are partially caused by opportunity cost. This is a situation where the satisfaction of each individual decision decreases as the number of options increases. For each individual choice at the same time means the rejection of other opportunities that remain unused and untried. Consumers develop fictions and fantasies, imagining hypothetical situations of alternative choices and comparing these with the outcome of a real choice that may appear disadvantageous or unattractive compared to similar imaginings. For example, the average supermarket today offers around 40,000 different items, but the average household needs on average around 150 products to ensure normal operations [42]. This means that the vast majority of the products offered by the average supermarket pass through the filters of consumer choice, at the cost of increasing opportunity cost. In the COVID-19 era, it is possible to consider some reduction in opportunity cost (and a reduced sense of “feeling of missing out”) when consumer choice did not only focus on mainstream consumer products (food, clothing, electronics) but also, for example, on various activities and entertainment requiring social contacts. During the lockdown in particular, the options for paid and unpaid leisure activities were very limited and the space for choice drastically restricted.

In the post-COVID era, we are now witnessing the rapid revitalization of the space of choice in various areas of consumption, which reinforces feelings of individual freedom, yet also implies an increase in transaction costs. According to Mlčoch [43], the decision-making process and each choice made place considerable demands on the time, energy, and cognitive abilities of consumers seeking and comparing information about products, their prices, quality, and countless other characteristics. The increasing transaction costs associated with choice may ultimately lead consumers to resign and definitively refuse to make the planned choice. Vardi [44] illustrates such a situation with the example of Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union who, after very difficult negotiations with the Soviet authorities, were allowed to emigrate to Israel on a limited basis in the early 1970s. Smaller groups of Soviet emigrants were confronted in Israel with a Western-style economy and a standard of living equivalent to Western welfare standards. According to some memoirs, Jewish emigrants accustomed to the conditions of shopping in the Soviet Union found it difficult to navigate the goods on offer in Israeli supermarkets and often left without making a purchase.

This brings us to the problem where the principle of “more is better” moves actors not toward liberation but rather closer to states of paralysis and passivity. Czech [6] reached conclusions supporting this thesis in the present when studying the functioning of Swedish pension funds in recent decades. While 70 financial companies in Sweden had offered a total of 465 pension funds in 2000, this increased to 800 in 2006; by 2015, 102 companies were involved in the administration of a total of 843 pension funds in Sweden [6]. The consequence of the increasing options for types of pension savings was a delay in potential buyers pursuing such savings and an overall decline in pension savings contracts. For example, Google, following the recommendation of the results of one of its marketing studies, decided to increase the number of links listed on a single page when a specific password was entered. This move was oriented toward accommodating Google’s customers, who had repeatedly expressed in surveys a desire to increase the amount of input when searching for information. When Google tripled the number of links per page, search and information tracking through Google began to plummet [45].

And yet other, namely behavioral economics studies consider this type of paralysis and resignation from making decisions due to being overwhelmed with large volumes of choices to be rather rare [46]. The more significant problem, as they see it, is the implementation of decisions that are not only disadvantageous, but often fatally damaging to the interests of the actors themselves. This is attributed to people’s limited attention spans, their easy manipulability, and the underestimation or unintentional disregard of important product parameters, referencing their price or quality. In general, the behavioral economics perspective accepts the thesis that freedom of choice is not a guarantee of an efficient decision-making process, but only the potential to achieve optimized choice outcomes in terms of pursuing one’s own goals and priorities. The reason is that the effectiveness of the decision-making process is significantly impaired by the limits of people’s cognitive capacities and limited attention. When cognitive resources are depleted and attention is declining, the decision-making process turns into a shallow, intuitive affair, generating many missteps. This is especially true when dealing with information, where increasing volumes of information often do not lead to more efficient solutions and decisions, but rather to suboptimal outcomes and higher overall transaction costs [47].

6. The problem of choice and reduced satisfaction: Information, aspiration, adaptation

At a general level, the behavioral and social sciences confirm the thesis that the proliferation of choices fundamentally complicates acts of decision-making, increases costs for consumers, and leads to an increase in indecision and feelings of dissatisfaction. Yet consumers reject potential and actual reductions in choice and experience them as a threat to their freedom of choice, especially for certain types of products [48]. This was confirmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the reduction of offline shopping options triggered a strong psychological response from consumers [2, 26]. As a result, business activities were concentrated in the online virtual shopping environment while more or less maintaining the abundance of product choices that consumer markets demanded. At the same time, due to health concerns, consumer demand grew for non-standard distribution channels for the goods purchased [49].

Let us next attempt to summarize and briefly describe the possible effects that may act as complementary and interrelated forces in the extensive field of consumer choices. Why, then, might we feel worse off in situations “when we have more”?

First of all, this is a problem of information. The easy availability and abundance of information is not only a more general defining feature of a contemporary technologically advanced society [50] and a common attribute of everyday behavior, but also an elementary principle of the functioning of consumer culture, where it is reproduced and confirmed by a globally functioning and operating platform of information flows from producers, sellers, and consumers. Decision-making based on easy and quick access to large volumes of information should, according to all the assumptions of rational choice theory, optimize choice or lead consumers to favorable or desirable choice outcomes in terms of their own expectations and desires. And yet behavioral economists point to the practical problem of people’s cognitive limits and their declining ability to gather, organize, compare, and evaluate all available information on different products of interest in a comprehensible way. Thus, more information and escalating choices may not necessarily lead in a linear fashion to greater efficiency in achieving individual goals and making the most advantageous decisions. “However, because of limited attention and cognitive resources, people are not able to use all available information and freedom of choice effectively to achieve their own best interests” [40]. Imagine the amount of information that customers must accumulate, evaluate, and compare in their search for the best possible product choice when, for example, even a single brand of sporting goods in a retailer’s catalog represents more than two dozen different individual parameters in an offering of tens and hundreds of other models of a similar product from other brands [33]. Is it even possible to organize and mutually compare hundreds and perhaps thousands of pieces of information from different quality parameters and features among such a wide range of product offerings?

Consumers are sensitive to this fact; as early as at the stage of decision and the making of the choice itself, they may be anticipating the inner turmoil and uncertainty of the final choice. Recall that this anticipation of internal tension due to a lack of options and means to evaluate all the information available to retailers is based on the knowledge that every choice made also implies a decision not to make alternative choices that may be more advantageous overall or that may prove after some time to have been more advantageous. The fact that consumers decide for the best possible option out of the available choices based of the amount of information available to them is thus accompanied by ongoing uncertainty and doubt, which also reduces the subjective feelings of satisfaction in and enjoyment of the product purchased. “However, the increasing personal anxiety and rising transaction costs associated with informing oneself about choices from an ever-larger set of goods on offer can still be ‘incorporated’ into a standard theory of consumer behavior” [42].

There are, however, at least two other reasons whose functions and meanings are somewhat outside the scope of research attention and are generally neglected even by the “standard” theories of consumer behavior. These are the issues of aspirations and hedonistic adaptation.

We examine the question of aspirations in the form of hopes and expectations of what we want to achieve in the area of consumer welfare. As a rule, these tend to increase in situations of high material security, accompanied by a proliferation of consumption opportunities as an inseparable feature of the rising standard of living in affluent societies. Furthermore, consumer aspirations are systematically and programmatically initiated by a dense network of information flows, images, and messages produced by the advertising industry’s media apparatus and by advanced tools of integrated marketing communication, including the use of sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies. In the media-amplified hedonistic orientation of life, complete with examples and presentations of different variants and models of the attractiveness of lifestyles, the ethos of “a life of unlimited possibilities”, “a world without limits”, “a life of infinite opportunities” is awakened, which inevitably widens the gap between the reality (what we actually achieve) and the possibility (what we would like to achieve).

Lastly, there is the problem of (hedonistic) adaptation, which is closely related to the effects of increasing aspirations. Hedonistic adaptation, in the case of consumption, is what subsequently weakens the intensity of the initial enjoyment and the pleasure from the goods acquired (we find interesting similarities here with Weber-Fechner’s law defining the relationship between psychic stimulus and perceived change—if the intensity of a stimulus grows by a geometric order of magnitude, then the intensity of the sensation grows by an arithmetic order of magnitude).

Behavioral economics here assumes that people are emotionally adaptive, finding support for this claim in Brickman and Campbell’s psychological theory of hedonistic adaptation [51]. Thus, achieving a higher degree of consumer well-being may cause a certain fluctuation or deflection in the level of subjective happiness, however this returns to its original level after a certain period of time. Many consider that the achievement of a feeling of happiness lies in notions of fulfillment of aspirations, and yet once the goalposts are passed and these aspirations realized, they are quickly forgotten and cast into the past as unnecessary artifacts of one’s own biography. This explains why there is such fervent pursuit of ever higher standards of living in affluent societies, why people endeavor to make their material comfort even more “comfortable” and convenience ever more “convenient”. The past is always judged from the perspective of a higher aspirational level, and perhaps we too easily succumb to the illusion of the added value of well-being to a future from which perhaps too much is expected.

Hedonistic adaptation seems to operate at another level as well. Namely, consumers may exhibit a decreased ability to predict the chilling effect of adaptation due to higher expectations, also based on their own belief that their choice will be the “best” choice (depending on their ability to obtain, compare, and evaluate information). This contributes to the optimistic scenario of hoping that the choice will not bring disappointment, but rather longer-term feelings of satisfaction. However, these aspirations mean that the effects of hedonistic adaptation will weigh all the more heavily on this group of consumers. When one considers how quickly the costs associated with seeking the best price for a product are “amortized” over time as a result of hedonistic adaptation, their losses seem all the greater.

7. Conclusion

Consumer culture does not consist solely of a specific type of material culture and does not only express systems of relationships to material values. It represents a world of symbols and signs that transforms material goods into their immaterial meanings, including the creation of identities, sources of self-reflection, and modifications of social roles, including the definition and redefinition of social relationships. Consumer culture is subject to changes of varying intensity, depth, and duration. The most significant transformations of recent decades would include not only the democratization of consumerism, but also the expansion of consumption opportunities and the unprecedented abundance of consumer choices. Consumer culture is characterized by its ambivalent nature. In the spirit of rational choice theory, the proliferation of choices is a positive and universally useful phenomenon, which also promotes a desired emancipation of individual freedoms. However, from the perspective of behavioral economists and many sociologists and social psychologists, this phenomenon is problematic and highly ambiguous, as it generates social and psychological risks that are unseen and difficult to predict. What was originally a rational and generally accepted requirement for the constant expansion of the space of choice has become an irrational desire with considerable potential to harm all those concerned. In this context, the “more is better” principle is a significant complication for consumers, where it is increasingly difficult to operate without experiencing cognitive dissonance, self-blame, regret, and feelings of self-defeat. Moreover, empirical research during the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance to consumers of feelings of safety and security, which will likely be a central theme of the shopping experience in the post-COVID era [22]. At the same time, there are many overlooked arguments to support the claim that the limitation of consumer choice during the COVID-19 crisis occurred only partially and only in the conventional shopping environment. And yet the freedom of consumer choice for certain types of products was maintained and even enhanced in the virtual shopping environment. The psychological discomfort associated with choice in an environment of many opportunities was therefore not eliminated and may have contributed to the overall psychological discomfort and mental distress during the lockdown. However, during the COVID-19 era opportunity cost was decreasing, particularly for paid forms of entertainment and leisure activities involving social contact (concerts, sports matches, etc.).

At present, we have an opportunity to observe many social initiatives, the dematerialization movement, and numerous spontaneous civic manifestations whose appeals have intensified precisely at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in recent weeks in the context of the war in Ukraine, rising inflation, and the scarcity of some strategic raw materials. These call for changes in the politics of lifestyles in the spirit of the principle of “less is more”, a transformation of value orientations appealing to ecological and environmental responsibility, solidarity, and accountability, voluntary frugality, life minimalism or alternative hedonism as a return to the roots of the philosophical agenda of Epicureanism, in which hedonism was defined by “modest materialism and tranquility”. The rule should be to live a rich life by modest means. In these transformations of life attitudes and value worlds, it is not only the actual patterns of consumption behavior and the motivations for consumption decisions that are fundamentally changing for individuals and groups, but also the deeper layers of their identities, which will seek new sources of affirmation in the environment of consumer culture markets. The question then remains as to what form these sources of identities will take and in what direction they will be further developed in terms of the interactions of markets and consumers, such that markets may retain the direction of “more is better” or all the preconditions of economic prosperity and growth as the condicio sine qua non of their existence, while at the same time offering sufficiently credible sources of social identities to newly emerging alternatives to (counter-) consumerism, intertwined in many ways with its radical reduction and rejection. Thus, it is not only consumers in decision-making and choice implementation situations that find themselves in an ambivalent situation, but also the markets themselves, as well as the accompanying systems of marketing support for consumer culture that respond to current and future lifestyle politics.

Acknowledgments

The result was created with the use of institutional support for long-term conceptual development of research of the University of Finance and Administration.