Sometimes it strikes in the oil and vinegar section. You've just popped in for a straightforward replacement bottle of own-brand extra virgin when you glance up at the vast and terrifying array of greeny-yellow bottles and suddenly find yourself frozen with doubt.
Might the cheaper olive oil and sunflower mix be better for cooking with? What if the Taste The Difference stuff really does taste nicer? And if you go for that one, which should it be: Greek, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Lithuanian or cold-pressed, single estate from the banks of the Limpopo?
Maybe your particular vulnerability is eggs (Barn? Free-range? Organic? Cotswold Legbar?). Maybe it's jam (Conserve? Preserve? Seedless? Low-sugar? High-fruit?).
Or milk (Whole? Skimmed? Semi-skimmed? Jersey? Goat? Sheep? Buffalo? Kangaroo?).
Whichever the aisle, we've all been there: a routine trip to the supermarket has ended up taking three times longer than it should because of the stupidly large range of varieties we have to wade through. If it's all for our benefit, how come it often ends up making us frustrated?
As an unashamedly Thatcherite free-marketeer, I never thought I'd hear myself railing against the tyranny of choice. Choice means competition, and competition makes us all richer.
Even so, recently, I've begun to ask myself whether we're enjoying too much of a good thing.
Consider, for example, that in Tesco it is now possible to buy no fewer than 38 types of milk. Some of it is flavoured with strawberry, banana or Belgian chocolate; some has active bacterial flora; some has extra omega-3; and some, quite possibly, is a bit like the white, plain, unmuckedabout-with, milk-flavoured stuff we all used to drink happily in the days before we turned into paranoid health freaks. And that's before you get to the aisle with 154 flavours of jam, or the one with 107 varieties of pasta.
Consider, too, the spectacular variety of TV programmes we can flick through now that most of us have cable. Or the mindboggling number of new airports to which we can now fly cheaply, from Stansted, Bristol, Manchester or Prestwick.
Think of the blink-and-you've-missed-them, cheap, instant fashion trends we can buy into at Topshop, Gap, Primark, Zara or Tesco. Think of the crazy variety of courses now on offer at university, from windsurfing to the semiotics of EastEnders.
If freedom of choice really were the route to contentment, we ought by now to be experiencing hitherto undreamt-of heights of ecstasy. But we're not, are we? Instead, we're mostly wishing we could turn back the clock and return to those innocent, choicefree days when Saturday night meant Morecambe And Wise, and when Heinz's 57 Varieties sounded like an awful, awful lot.
This may seem an ungrateful response to all the miracles the Thatcher revolution achieved -
remember when telephones were a state monopoly and it used to take three months to get a new one installed? - but it is also a wholly natural one. As scientific studies have shown, humankind cannot bear too much variety.
In one U.S. experiment, customers at a gourmet food store were invited to taste six different jams on a display table and given a discount coupon to buy any variety they liked. A week later, they were given the same deal, only this time they had 24 jam varieties from which to choose.
