How does anyone ever

How does anyone ever buy toothpaste these days? I mean, my god there have got be a thousand options. And maybe it's just that my last tube of toothpaste lasted for quite a long time, but there I was standing in the toothpaste aisle at Target the other day thinking to myself, "When did toothpaste get an entire aisle all to itself?"

Mind you, I'm a fairly tolerant person. I can certainly understand that there are people out there in this great big world of ours who, for one reason or another, need to whiten their teeth while they brush, or to fight tartar, or to rejuvinate their gums, or to grow hair, or whatever. But what about those of us who just want our good 'ol plain-Jane tube of Crest?

I think what really troubles me is all the decision making that goes into selecting a tube of toothpaste these days. Do I want paste, gel, striped, or flavor crystals? Do I want whitening, extra whitening, or super whitening? A co-branded mouthwash additive? Baking soda? Peroxide? Both?

Really, I just don't know what to think. Where I come from, you use baking soda for your volcano science project and peroxide to bleach your hair. Why would I want to put either of those in my mouth and scrub around for a while?

Worse yet, if all these various options really do have magical properties, and if you can combine them with ease -- as their hundreds of different combinations would suggest -- then why do they sell them all separately? Why isn't there just a Colgate 2.0 sitting there on the shelf with a shiny new label? I would buy that. I would be okay with that. But all this other stuff? It's too much, too much.