Hunter, gatherer, shopper
As I declare every chance I get, I hate to shop. Department stores make me feel as though Chanel No. 5 was mustard gas, seeping into my skin. Big-box stores make me hate humanity. Pricey boutiques make me hate myself.
So when I read about a new study that found that the average woman spends eight years of her life shopping, I smugly reveled in my un-averageness. After surveying 2,000 women, the global market research company OnePoll found that over a period of 63 years, the typical female spends 25,184 hours and 53 minutes shopping for food, clothing and other household essentials for the family. She makes 84 trips to the supermarket per year and spends just under 95 hours per year there. Women spend more than 100 hours and 48 minutes per year shopping for clothes, 40 hours and 30 minutes shopping for shoes, and 29 hours and 31 minutes looking for accessories like jewelry, scarves and handbags.
No men were surveyed in this poll, but the implication is clear: Women shop, men don’t. Not that men don’t spend money, of course. But the conventional wisdom is that they tend to spend larger amounts of it in less frequent intervals. We assume men, for the most part, like to turn discretionary spending into an elaborately planned-out project. They like to look at those full-page Fry’s Electronics ads in the newspaper and (as has been explained to me by no fewer than 15 men) think not only about the gadgets they might buy right away but the ones they might want or need in the future. The Fry’s ad is apparently sometimes more compelling than porn.
Women may spend hours salivating over the avalanche of catalogs that pile up in their mailboxes, but because they’ve been conditioned to view real-life shopping as an end in itself, they salivate even more over the tactile experience of running their hands along racks of clothing. They do it often. They like to bring friends along. And because they’re generally responsible for making purchases for the entire household (not just handbags and jewelry but other people’s socks and Cheerios), they’re often more likely to, you know, actually buy things each time they go out.
In other words, in contemporary shopping, as in primitive civilizations, there are hunters
and there are gatherers. And the gatherers, at least judging from this survey, evidently sacrifice a lot of daylight hours to the blandishments of retail establishments.
But I’m going to challenge the assumption that this dichotomy breaks down solely along gender lines. Surely more men are taking on shopping duties for their households and plenty of women loathe the mall as much as I do. Besides, the entire nature of shopping has changed dramatically over the last few years. In fact, “non-shoppers” like me will probably spend far more than eight years of their lives looking at stuff with an eye toward buying it.
In fact, that pretty much describes just being awake now -- at least, awake with an Internet connection. I may say I hate to shop, but really, I just hate stores. Recently I ordered a $4 plastic hair clip online because I couldn’t bear the thought of going to Rite Aid, with its piped-in Bruce Hornsby music and unattended toddlers emitted piercing shrieks in the candy aisle. I’m not saying this was a good use of my evening. In the time it took me to Google “plastic hair clip” and sift through about 500 images of hair accessories, I probably could have driven to Rite Aid, bought the thing and volunteered at a soup kitchen for an hour (where the clip would have been in my hair rather than in some mail room in Ohio).
Still, it’s the kind of maneuver that’s central to my self-concept. It helps me convince myself that I’m a hunter and not a gatherer, that not liking bricks-and-mortar stores means I’m not materialistic, that I have nothing in common with those harpies who, in my imaginings, sacrifice eight years of their lives to the discount bins at Target.
But now that I think of it, that’s a pretty light sentence compared to a lifetime of trawling the 24-hour-a-day store that is Google’s “shopping” search engine. Maybe the gatherers have had it figured out all along. Or maybe when those primitive men went out hunting for weeks on end, they were really just milling around Fry’s. Either way, I hope OnePoll never gets hold of my Internet search history.
