How do you deal with lettuce?

This is a quickie - almost an incidental. A passing thought.

How do you deal with lettuce - in particular iceberg lettuce - which I know we gourmet people are not supposed to like, but actually do. Because of all my years of visiting France we tend to have a green salad - usually just iceberg, but sometimes including other greens - after our main dish, almost every day. I discard the outer tatty leaves and then - as in the first picture above, I remove the leaves one by one, from the outside - cutting the stalk down as I go, discarding any tatty bits and the spine of the outer leaves. I do not wash it - there never seems to be a need to do so. I find that this way the lettuce is preserved much longer, because for just the two of us we don't usually use more than three leaves at a time.

But I do know that some people slice it, as in the second picture. To my mind this leaves you with a lettuce which will develop a brown edge that you will have to cut off and discard every time you use it. Of course if you are using the whole lettuce it doesn't matter.

I can see that for some uses - for making sandwiches for example - it is more practical to shred the lettuce, but I would have thought you should just remove the number of leaves you want and then shred them, rather than cutting through the entire lettuce. Shredding also doesn't take into account the woodier stalks on the outside leaves or any tatty bits on the interior - and it's amazing how sometimes you find this as you progress inwards.

I take the same approach to all kinds of lettuce, but I do wash those hydroponic ones, as they often have quite a lot of dirt clinging to them.

What do you do?