There is a thread on Reddit's r/CasualUK that has been running, in various forms, for approximately four years. The question changes. The desperation does not. "Just need someone to tell me if this is a good price for a slow cooker," wrote one user in 2022, attaching a screenshot of a Morphy Richards product on a John Lewis listing. Forty-seven people replied. Three of them had owned the same slow cooker. Two of those three had conflicting opinions. The original poster bought a different slow cooker entirely, from a brand nobody had mentioned, and returned to the thread to announce this outcome as though filing a formal report.
Photo: John Lewis, via americanassociationoficonographers.com
Welcome to the Second Opinion Economy. Population: all of us.
The Committee of Confused Strangers
At some point — and historians of consumption will one day pinpoint exactly when — British shoppers stopped trusting themselves. Not in a crisis-of-confidence way. In a very practical, very modern way. We realised, collectively, that the internet contained people who had already bought the thing we were considering, and that those people had Opinions, and that those Opinions were technically free.
The result is a shadow infrastructure of purchasing consultancy that operates entirely on goodwill, mild boredom, and the particular satisfaction of telling a stranger what to do. Facebook groups dedicated to specific supermarket meal deals have hundreds of thousands of members. There are WhatsApp threads in which grown adults forward photographs of their shopping trolleys mid-aisle, awaiting approval before proceeding to the checkout. Mumsnet has entire subforums that function, essentially, as a distributed purchasing department for British domestic life.
The strangest part isn't that this exists. It's that it works — sort of. People do get answers. The answers are frequently contradictory, occasionally unhinged, and delivered with the confidence of someone who has never once been wrong about anything. But they arrive, and Britain, grateful for any external input at all, absorbs them.
The Paradox of Crowdsourced Desire
Here's the problem nobody mentions: the democratisation of advice has not made us more decisive. It has made us considerably less.
Psychologists have a name for what happens when you introduce too many options or opinions into a decision: choice overload. Barry Schwartz wrote a whole book about it. But what we've created is something subtly different — opinion overload. We're not paralysed by the products themselves. We're paralysed by the community response to the products. Someone on a consumer forum says the build quality is poor. Someone else says it's lasted them eight years. A third person mentions they bought it as a gift for their mum and she seems happy with it, which tells us almost nothing useful but somehow still influences the eventual decision.
Photo: Barry Schwartz, via printablecalendar2024.org
The result is that we spend longer researching than we would have spent simply living with the consequences of a mildly suboptimal purchase. A wrong kettle, it turns out, is still a kettle. It boils water. You survive.
Why We Keep Asking Anyway
The compulsion isn't really about information. If it were about information, we'd read the technical specifications, check the Which? review, and be done with it. The compulsion is about something more interesting: the transfer of responsibility.
If seventeen strangers told you to buy the air fryer, and the air fryer turns out to be mediocre, the failure is distributed. You didn't make a bad decision — you made a reasonable decision based on available community consensus. The regret is socialised. This is, if you squint at it, a form of emotional insurance. We're not outsourcing the choice. We're outsourcing the blame.
There's also something lonelier at play. Shopping, for much of human history, was a social act. You went to the market with someone. You consulted the person behind the counter, who knew what they were talking about. The transaction was embedded in a relationship. Online retail stripped all of that out and handed us a search bar. The forums and Facebook groups and Reddit threads are, in a slightly chaotic way, an attempt to rebuild the social fabric of shopping from scratch — using whoever happens to be online at 11pm on a Tuesday.
The Expert Who Doesn't Exist
The cruelest trick of the Second Opinion Economy is that the oracle we're consulting is, statistically, no better qualified than we are.
The person assuring you that the mattress is worth the money bought their mattress four years ago under completely different circumstances, with a different back, in a different house, at a different price point. The person warning you off the budget airline has a trauma response to a specific Ryanair experience in 2019 that has calcified into universal truth. The person who says "I've had mine for years and it's brilliant" is, bless them, offering you a sample size of one.
We know this. We know it intellectually. And yet we keep asking, because the alternative — sitting alone with our uncertainty and making a call — feels somehow irresponsible. As though wanting something, independently and without committee approval, is a form of recklessness we can no longer afford.
Need, Want, and the Question Nobody's Asking
What's quietly extraordinary about all of this is that the question we're posting to strangers is almost never the real question. "Is this a good price for a coffee machine?" is not really a question about coffee machines. It's a question about whether we deserve the thing, whether the timing is right, whether spending money on ourselves is justified, whether the version of us who wants this object is a version we should listen to.
The internet cannot answer that. The internet can only tell you about the grind settings and the milk frother and whether the drip tray is a faff to clean. The actual question — do I want this, and is that wanting okay? — remains entirely unaddressed, floating unanswered above the thread while forty-three people argue about descaling tablets.
Perhaps that's the point. Perhaps the asking is the whole thing. Not a means to a decision, but a way of inhabiting the wanting for a little longer — of keeping the possibility alive before the purchase collapses it into reality.
The slow cooker thread, after all, was never really about the slow cooker.
It was about spending a Wednesday evening feeling, briefly, less alone in a world full of things to buy and not nearly enough certainty about any of them.
