I was in an Arby’s and group came in and apperantly the people at Arby’s recognized them because the manager immediatly opened another register. Three of the people ordered with no problem, the fourth couldn’t decide. I got my food, sat down, ate, and read several chapters of a book. When I left, she was still staring at the menu and her friends were leaving. On a couple of occasions one of her friends offered to order something for her, but she refused. I left without ever seeing if she got anything. SHe seemed to have limited it down to the beef and cheddar of a chicken bacon swiss. This after a half hour or so.
It got me thinking and is there a term for this kind of crippling indecision? It also got me thinking what would she do if she ever had to go to the store for, say, peanut butter?
“Aboulomania” is apparently the word you are looking for. One reason for this lady’s difficulty might be because she was overwhelmed by choices. Maybe “Analysis paralysis” as well.
Peanut butter may not be a problem as she may already have a preference, and there are not that many to choose from. Planning a holiday might be a nightmare though.
It may be limited to food. I can get such a panicky queasy stomach that I can’t pick something to eat even though I’m weak from hunger. I keep dry crackers around for this reason. It has caused crises while traveling with a group.
Or it could be something broader. There are certainly people (I’m related to one by marriage), who are often incapacitated by indecision, for reasons that are far from clear.
It is a thing right enough. I often shop at Lidl or Aldi simple because the amount of choices and ground to cover at my local big Tesco can lead to spending far too long deciding.
“the tyranny of choice” is another phrase I’ve heard for this.
Even if you’re shopping alone, bringing a shopping cart full of items to the register and having to look at everything twenty times and change your mind on what you’re buying fifty times and leaving a shopping cart full of unpurchased items that have to be put back on the shelf, and then can’t decide which credit card to use or maybe pay in cash, all the while the cashier and the people behind you are waiting is also being a selfish pain in the ass.
How would she live? You have to chose your clothes in the morning. Chose your breakfast, choose your lunch, chose if you want to be late for work. Choose if you want to blow your top at the kids for ignoring you for the 34th time today.
And for me, food is the one thing I never have problems deciding on. At restaurants where I know the chef, I’ll often ask for whatever is good that night. Sometimes I don’t bother looking at the menu, and just duplicate my gf’s order.
"Elliot had a small tumour cut from his cortex near the brain’s frontal lobe. He had been a model father and husband, holding down an important management job in a large corporation and was active in his church. But the operation changed everything.
Elliot’s IQ stayed the same - testing in the smartest 3 per cent - but, after surgery, he was incapable of decision. Normal life became impossible. Routine tasks that should take 10 minutes now took hours. Elliot endlessly deliberated over irrelevant details: whether to use a blue or black pen, what radio station to listen to and where to park his car. When contemplating lunch, he carefully considered each restaurant’s menu, seating and lighting, and then drove to each place to see how busy it was. But Elliot still couldn’t decide where to eat. His indecision was pathological."
It sounds like simple immaturity to me. I notice children will bring two or three items to the checkout line, and when their parent says “You’re only getting one. Now choose,” they can have a very hard time picking one. Sounds like she never learned to make a choice. And it sounds pathological to me.
According to OP, this is an adult woman who took an estimated 30+ minutes to make a fast food order – whose friends finished and left before she even had food – and has apparently done this enough that the restaurant recognized and prepared for it.
This is very, very likely an actual mental health issue in the OCD ballpark.
Heck, I’m indecisive enough that I get grief about it from friends and family, but that’s in the range of taking 3-4 minutes to make an order when most people take 1-2. Being compulsively unable to choose for 30 minutes is a different animal.
When I worked in a bookstore in college, there was an occasional customer (“customer?”) who would kinda behave this way. He’d wander around the “impulse buy” racks near the checkout, and repeatedly pick up and put down things like candy bars or small decorations. The only thing he’d ever actually buy would be, like, 1-2 individual sticks of incense (which were only priced as 1 for 10, but the owner made an exception for him) or maybe a pack of gum. He would often try to haggle on a .30 purchase despite knowing the cashiers weren’t allowed to do that.
At the time, I think I regarded him as being intentionally weird hoping to get free handouts or something, but a lot of it seemed like pretty compulsive behavior in hindsight.
It certainly is cynical. There are people who are compulsively unable to make choices. But they don’t have to impose on others as a result. Maybe this group didn’t mind this behavior in their friend, and then there’s nothing to say about it, a finicky customer is one of the things you have to put up with in a retail business. But if that’s not the case, people who are like this for whatever reason have the choice to stay home, choose something they don’t like, or eat nothing, so that they’re not visiting their problem on others. I can’t tell which situation the OP has seen, but I assure you there are plenty of people who don’t have to behave that way but do anyway for selfish reasons.
TLDR: Take a donkey. Deny him both food and water for a few days. Then, when you let him out, place a bucket of water and a bucket of oats equidistant from him. The poor beast, paralyzed by indecision, will die of thirst/starve to death before making either decision that would save his life.
I had a neighbor who was a nurse at the state’s mental health hospital. She said crippling indecision was an Obsessive-Compulsive thing. She said she had a patient who literally could not choose whether or not to put jelly on her toast and would look back and forth between the toast and the jelly until someone finally took it away.
At that point something like that crosses from “annoying quirk” into “incapable of functioning in society and gets committed to a mental hospital.”