I go to the store, and am instantly faced with a choice: do I want gel or paste, with or without bleach, baking soda or not, kiddie or adult flavoured… I just want plain old toothpaste. Bleaching my mouth scares me. Baking soda tastes like crap. Now, the challenge is — find the toothpaste I want on the shelf. The search usually takes me about 5 minutes. Once I finally find it, I buy 3 or 4 tubes, because the search is so painful!

Then I go to the next aisle in Target, and begin my quest for deodorant. Hey, looks like they randomly renamed all the scents again… Urgh!

Levis and their 501s.

Take Eddie Bauer, for instance. Last year I discovered their Ultimate Cargo Pants. These cargo pants were, contrary to typical marketing practice of over-hyping, actually _ultimate_: solid construction, heavyweight fabric, roomy cargo pockets with inner sub-pockets (perfect for nestling cell phones), and amazingly handy _dual slant pockets_ on each side that kept frequently accessed cargo like keys and pocket knives separated from randomly accumulated cargo like receipts and change. As soon as I tried Ultimate Cargoes, I knew that I had been elevated to a new plane of pantsy goodness.

Naturally, Eddie Bauer discontinued them.

The replacement? “Complete Cargo Pants.” What were they _thinking_? How can “complete” surpass “ultimate”? Do the “complete” cargoes have the dual slant pockets? Nope. It would seem, then, that they’re somewhat deficient in completeness.

Fortunately, my standard policy of “strategic reserve” purchasing in the weeks that followed my discovery of Ultimate Cargo Pants netted me a total of eight pair — three regular, three fleece lined, and two shorts (yes, they discontinued the Ultimate Cargo Shorts, too!) — but when that supply runs out, I’m hosed.

If they had kept on making Ultimate Cargoes, I would have kept on buying them, probably for life. Wow, they lost a lot of sales.

But at least I’m not bitter about it.

What, you don’t like that? There are plenty of people who do. You might think that one choice is enough – as long as it is yours.