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.