Buying a grill used to be simple: You went to Sears and picked one from the handful in stock. Then—oh my God oh my God—where did all these grills come from? (The Internet.) Amazon has hundreds, so does eBay. Even Sears.com lists more than 500 gas grills. Sears!
I moved recently, and I needed a new grill. When I started researching, I was quickly paralyzed: There were too many options to make a truly informed choice. Because we live in a time of infinite gadgets (thanks, China!), deciding is almost impossible. You can read reviews, summon personal experiences, and buy something that you’re pretty sure is going to be good, but there’s no way of knowing whether you’re getting the best product for your money.
I had $300. The grill needed to be powerful, compact, and corrosion-resistant. I was initially drawn to the Fuego Element, an elegant upright tube from a former Apple industrial design director that has a porcelain enameled cast iron grate, two circular burners, and a tiny footprint that wouldn’t stomp all over my Chihuahua run of a patio.
I loved how it looked, but I didn’t know anyone who had one. I wasn’t sure it was any good. I got even more insecure when a friend who considers himself a barbecue expert joked that this overdesigned pillar of fire would be “perfect for cookouts on my patio in Dubai.”
So I hit the Internet to find something more California-appropriate.
Ugh. Just as consumer products have proliferated, so too have product reviews: from traditional pubs to review sites to blogs to YouTube to customer feedback forums. Even if you could read them all—which you can’t—the endless sea of product means that no single reviewer can have a comprehensive view of a product category any more. It’s too many products, reviewed by too many people—including me.
“The Internet created a massive choice problem and then started to solve it with reviews and recommendations,” explains Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. “But now there’s a new choice problem: choice of review. Too many reviews are as bad as no reviews.”
This glut explains why services like the Wirecutter, This Is My Next, and (yes) WIRED’s Top Three exist. They’re trying to replace the institutional authority that was lost when everyone became a product reviewer.
I turned to the Wirecutter. All I knew was that I wanted a sturdy, small gas grill. Yet after reading several thousand words—some of which even quoted my “expert” friend—I was still undecided. Neither of the two big, ugly recommendations appealed to me.
The problem with the one-size-fits all approach is that each person is the key variable in their decision. Even when meta-reviews choose three or four big buckets—often based on price or type—those buckets can be too small for some of us. We need something that crosses a Wirecutter-style guide with a Buzzfeed quiz: Seven grills for twee design-conscious nerds with tiny yards. Click!
Unfortunately, that doesn’t exist.
Then one night after a few drinks, I dove back into my research. I woke up the next day to an email from Amazon confirming my purchase of the Fuego Element. Though WIRED does not endorse consuming alcohol in excess, it is an excellent way to free yourself from the tyranny of “good decisions.”
After my new grill arrived, I had a little get-together to celebrate. I whipped up a couple of grilled cheeses for the kids and dropped a pound and a half of grassfed ground beef on the ceramic grate. The burgers were crispy on the outside and just done in the center. Perfect. My smart-ass grillmaster friend later confessed that he found his a little overdone. What ever, Joe—they were just the way I like them. And besides, it’s my yard.
