Adriana, thanks for the laugh. I am just as bewildered by all this "choice" in the supermarket as the next woman. As the "sovereign consumer", I am supposed to be grateful for an ecomonic system that has provided me with twenty different brands of laundry powder, just to wash a bunch of dirty clothes.

I don't have time to stand in an aisleway reading the spines of hundreds of different coloured boxes to find out whether my clothes will come out "whiter than white" or lemon-scented, and I am even less interested. Just clean will do.

So I mostly shop at the same small supermarket, where there is a little less choice, and I snatch exactly the same "no brand" box off the same shelf each time (usually down the bottom and at the back).

On the occasions when my supermarket runs out of the no brand, and I am forced to go to a bigger supermarket - the horror, the horror! More often than not, I flee from all this dreadful choice, unable to make such a life-changing decision, and go next door to borrow some laundry powder to get me by until the no brand appears again on the same shelf in the same place.

The really depressing part of the supermarket is Aisle 37 with the 482 'different' potato chip packets. If supermarkets sold only healthy items, there would be about 3 aisles (error: I forgot the 400 different ways of packaging lav paper in Aisles 38 and 39).

When the Berlin wall came down, a friend living there said their supermarkets were clogged up with people from the eastern side who came to marvel at the multiple choices available. Shop on!