Introduction

Today I shopped for a plain white t-shirt. My requirements:

1. plain
2. white
3. t-shirt

All in all, pretty simple. So how in the everloving world did I spend 2+ hours buying plain white t-shirts?

Buying online

Buying basically anything online represents a hard problem.

First, you face a staggering amount of candidates. Search for lotions or cables or shirts and you'll find yourself trekking through an endless jungle of prices, styles, and brands.

Second, you don't have complete information about the candidates. Will it work well? Will it last?

To solve these problems, we have user reviews and curators such as Wirecutter. However, reviews can suffer from undue bias (e.g. sponsored content) and may not align with your personal needs. If you believe the opinions illegitimate or irrelevant, then you'll have to fall back upon your instincts or (hopefully) return policy.

Satisficing

When dealing with hard problems, with many possibilities and lack of information, people often get overwhelmed. When they don't get too overwhelmed to think, they employ satisficing. Instead of looking for an optimal solution, they accept a good enough solution.

In our plain white t-shirt buying, this manifests in 2 ways:

1. Going to a trusted source and buying the first shirt that makes sense
2. Imposing more restrictions, e.g. < $20, until one shirt emerges victorious

Conclusion

In my case, I tried both, yet I still spent 2+ hours shopping. Perhaps I need to get better at satisficing.