I was just thinking about this - I can go to the store and have fifty variations of peanut butter at my fingertips - but I get basically the same fifty variations anywhere in the US, and much of them anywhere in the world.
Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0 options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and there'd be an entirely different option.
We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places have a "local" beer available.
Someone once described the general difference between European and U.S. grocery stores: They said that in Europe, a store would have every kind of product, but not very many brands of any particular thing, maybe two or three for most non-staple products. But in the U.S., a store would either have like 20 brands of something or have none of them; i.e. not carry that kind of product at all. It seems to me like this points to “choice” being an important scale by which stores are measured in the U.S., but no, or little, negative associations are made with no products of a particular kind being available at all.
There's some of that European approach creeping into US markets thanks to Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud - we now have both Aldi and Trader Joe's which primarily have their own versions of products and carry only that brand (or occasionally a second 'mainstream' brand as special items). Costco is similar as well in typically having only a single brand of any given type of product.
Ever stopped to ponder the laundry detergent aisle at your local grocery store? Or the potato chip aisle? Especially on detergent, what's there is a huge proportion of the shelf space devoted to a couple of brands (which may, in fact, be from the same parent company) with very large containers taking up a lot of space for relatively little actual product, but lots of different choices for those brands. Or, as I like to say, 31 flavors of Tide Pods. Same goes for potato and corn chips. Lays and Ruffles dominate, which oversize bags that are half air, relegating other brands to lower shelves on one end. But consumers can "choose" from half a dozen different flavors of the same brands.
And it's the same all over the US. The only variation tends to be that some flavors Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle or Wasabi Ginger, e.g., appear more often in some markets than others.
Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0 options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and there'd be an entirely different option.
We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places have a "local" beer available.