Then you have to decide which is heads and which is tails. That compounds the choices and makes it even worse.
For that story to have relevance, that would mean she’s a complete ass who was starving to death when she entered the place. LOL
“Simple immaturity” in a child. But any adult who cannot make a simple decision about food is definitely in pathological territory.
See “analysis paralysis”
Barry Schwartz at Swarthmore wrote The Paradox of Choice, also a SciAm article The Tyranny of Choice
This can very definitely be an OCD thing. My teenage son has OCD. One of his coping strategies is to eliminate the need to make choices. When we go to a restaurant we’ve been to before, I can tell you exactly what he will order, as he always orders whatever he got last time. If it’s a new place, then he will stare at the menu and ask the same questions over and over and over until he finally narrows it down. If he likes what he got, that will be what he orders every time in the future. If not, repeat the ordeal the next time until he does find something he likes. Fortunately he’s vegetarian, which narrows down the choices considerably.
He is very self-aware. He even wrote a paper for English discussing the possibility that Hamlet had OCD.
I don’t have OCD, but I do this when I’m ordering fast food. (Don’t usually do it at full-service restaurants.) It speeds things up greatly, and the staff at many places I go frequently start ringing up and preparing my order as soon as I reach the counter, without me saying a word beyond “hello”. 
Which is pretty much the exact opposite of the woman mentioned in the OP.
Oh, God a new phobia I’ve never heard of. When I’m in a store I’m already anxious, the decision whether or not to even go down that aisle can be panic-inducing. Choosing is another problem I do have. Aarrrggghh.
I have (very rarely) suffered this when my blood sugar gets too low. I’m a proficient cook, and perfectly capable of making a good enough meal out of almost anything. But if I’ve waited waaayyyy too long to eat, say, after an illness or something, then I can stand staring into the pantry with hunger pangs unable to think what I might like. Or worse, nothing really sounds good to me, even though I’m very hungry.
I wonder if the conditions might be related? Perhaps low blood sugar disables or anesthetizes the same part of the frontal lobe?
I have no legitimate contribution to this thread, but the late comedian John Pinette had a routine about being stuck behind this exact sort of person.
I think you’re on to something.
Checking that cite, this is a hypothetical situation dreamed up by a philosopher. From a lifetime involved with horses, mules & donkeys, that simply does not happen in reality.
Equines are far too simple & realistic to get caught in such mental dilemmas. They would go for the water every time. There are basic biological reasons: you will die of thirst faster than dying of hunger.
Staring into the pantry being unable to think of what you might like sounds less like not being able to make a choice, and more like being unable to conceive of choices in the first place.
I’m having a hard time conceiving of how someone can’t just make a choice. If nothing else, you can do something relatively mathematical- rank them or something. Or a tournament of coin flips.
Low blood sugar can cause confusion and seizures. Mild seizures might manifest as just really bad confusion. I’d imagine either might feel a bit like indecisiveness when you know you have to eat but are having trouble deciding on what to eat. But a lot of people blame their attitude on “low blood sugar” when they are really just hungry. Are you diabetic and on insulin or other blood sugar lowering medicines? Have you been diagnosed with hypoglycemia due to another condition?
I doubt the OP’s case was confusion due to hypoglycemia. The restaurant staff seemed to anticipate that the customer would be indecisive and hypoglycemia isn’t predictable that way. If left untreated, the symptoms of hypoglycemia get worse, so there’s a good chance that over 30 minutes or so of severe hypoglycemia, the customer would have lost consciousness. If she were severely hypoglycemic, her friends would have noticed there was something wrong with her and they would not have blithely sat down and ignored her. If even one of the customer’s friends knew about her hypoglycemia problem, they would have gotten her a Coke so she didn’t die. I think the customer was unable to order for other reasons, and some severe anxiety or OCD disorder seems plausible. And sad.
Yes I know, I never intended to suggest otherwise. Just seemed relevant to this discussion.
Something like this happened to Mammahomie a couple of summers back. She lives about 125 miles, give or take, from the nearest spot that was to receive 100 percent totality from the August 2017 Eclipse. She simply could. not. decide. how she wanted to tackle it. Meet her oldest son (me) at the rest stop in St. Clair, Missouri and watch with her son & daughter-in-law? Go to some random Southern Illinois town and watch from there? Make a weekend of it and go to North Carolina? So paralyzed was she by indecision that she wound up making no decision and only got to see partiality from her Central Illinois backyard.
Do you want Harvey Dent? 'cause that’s how you get Harvey Dent.
Given that others here seem capable of taking my point without a detailed review of my medical history, Im going to decline to answer.
I never suggested that the customer in the story was dangerously hypoglycemic. I suggested that the two conditions might have similar mechanisms.
And honestly, the tone of your response left me wondering if you maybe need a cookie?
If decision making is itself the problem, then this doesn’t help: ranking by what criteria? Why coin flips and not dice? Every option has pros and cons, and other options may exist which are better. But better by what criteria? It’s a recursive loop, and you don’t have a mechanism to interrupt it.
Chocolate chip? Sugar? Fig Newton? Oreo? Vanilla Wafer? Sugar Wafer? Animal Cracker? Oatmeal? Oatmeal raisin? Biscotti? Chocolate Chocolate Chip? Black and White? Fortune? Fudge? Lady Finger? Macaroon? Coconut? Tea? Half moon? Rainbow?
I’ve had this and the related problem of both being very hungry and convinced that only some very particular food will do. “But that’s not the right bread!” nearly in tears. Weird creatures us humans.
bob++ nailed it in one!
My father has this disorder to the extreme… among other things.
The indecision is sometimes so crippling that he can’t function at all sometimes. Restaurant menus are the worst! And he almost always is not happy with what he ordered, how it was prepared, not what he expected, he should have ordered something else, or likes what you ordered better.
He suffers from extreme buyer’s remorse. Shopping with him is impossible. He will visit every store to look at certain item and every make/model/brand. Then after he finally makes the tortuous decision on something, he will dwell on it for weeks. How it’s not being exactly what he wanted or now it’s on sale at another store so he should have waited, etc…
When he’s in his manic phase he will begin jobs and projects obsessively. Unfortunately, if he hits a snag, complication, or a permanent decision, he can’t function. Previous mistakes or the potential of more problems haunt him. He just cannot commit to a path or a plan of action because it may be wrong or cause him more stress.