85% of all blog entries are a mixture of admonitions, cautions, prohibitions and downright injunctions*. Pardon the double negative, but I cannot not add to that figure. So here's mine, a hearty, from the gut injunction: there's too much damn choice and it's slowing everything down, no one can make a decision any longer.

Too many options, too many combinations, too many possibilities, there's no such thing now as the quick decision, gone, dead, vanished, it might as well stand between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Woolly Mammoth in the Natural History Museum, it's extinct as a concept. All there is, all we can expect, is paralysis. Do I do this, or should I do that, but what about that, maybe I could do all of them? But I'm too busy bloody thinking to do anything ! And too much of anything stimulates confusion.

The apple dropped when I was in a local chain coffee shop, stuck in a small line of people shuffling like penitent monks towards the serving counter. Me, I like an early morning coffee; a simple from the motherland cappuccino, that's all, nothing complicated. A little foam, throw in an espresso as the base, mix and serve piping hot. Easy. Less five minutes to put together. Yet this coffee chain (and for those of you who have read Moby Dick, it's got the same name as one of the characters in Melville's novel), advertises a Rubik's cube worth of coffee: hot or iced, flavoured or gourmet, teas by the bucket load, with umpteen different types of milk, where Tall is bizarrely the smallest size. I feel like I'm looking at a strobe light whenever I glance at their menu, it's dazzling, blinding to the eye. And these babies take a long time to create. That's without the clutching chest pain of hearing someone place a multiple order, which always has to be repeated and there's always something missing, or made wrong, or the order placer remembers at the last moment that they really wanted it to take away and would the Barrista mind....

What in the days of yore took a few minutes from ordering to you walking away with it in your hand takes an eternity now. I was in that line for nearly twenty minutes; it's only because I'm a Brit with a built in queuing gene and the determination that if I've started then I'll finish that I stayed

Simple things work, they are enjoyable. People should take a leaf from this. Don't over complicate, don't give us too much choice, if nothing else, it's a hell of a food and beverage cost to have all this stuff sitting around on the shelves. That's before the stupefying effect it has on us - the consumer. Go simple. Some years ago, a good friend who lives in LA took me to the exemplar of simple, a happy go lucky diner called the Pan Apple. The core menu revolves around burgers, with or without cheese basically, and a few other items, tuna sandwiches etc. Limited works; all food in front of you, bubbling and sizzling away on paper plates minutes after being ordered. This is it how it should be. Too much does n't work. The Pan Apple has a spot on operating model, and I'm not the only one thinking this either: http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2005/08/apple_pan_quali.html

I got my coffee in the end if you're interested. I'd waited so long I would n't have cared if it had come in a mop bucket with a piece of bacon floating in it.

*That percentage ? Made it up, but that's what it feels like some days plodding through Bloggerland