“As men and women (and relations between them) change, their shopping behaviors do, too, which will have huge implications for American business.”
“Most purchasing traditionally falls to women, and they usually do it willingly–even when shopping for the mundane necessities, even when the experience brings no particular pleasure, women tend to do it in dependable, agreeable fashion. Women take pride in their ability to shop prudently and well. In a study we ran of baby products, women interviewed insisted that they knew the price of products by heart, without even having to look. (Upon further inquiry, we discovered that they were mostly wrong.) As women’s roles change, so does their shopping behavior–their becoming a lot more like men in that regard–but they’re still the primary buyer in the American marketplace.”
“You’ll see a man impatiently move through a store to the section he wants, pick something up, and then, almost abruptly, he’s ready to buy, having taken no apparent joy in the process of finding. You’ve practically got to get out of his way. ”
“The great traditional arena for male shopping behavior has always been the supermarket. It’s here, with thousands of products within easy reach, that you can witness the carefree abandon and restless lack of discipline for which the gender is known. In one supermarket study, we counted how many shoppers came armed with lists. Almost all of the women had them. Less than a quarter of the men did. Any wife who’s watching the family budget knows better than to send her husband to the supermarket unchaperoned. … Throw a couple of kids in with Dad and you’ve got a lethal combination; he’s notoriously bad at saying no when there’s grocery acquisitioning to be done.”
“Supermarkets are places of high impulse buying for both sexes–fully 60 to 70 percent of purchases there were unplanned, grocery industry studies have shown us.”
“Paper grocery store coupons? Gone. Whoosh! Today less than 3 percent of all manufacturers’ coupons are ever redeemed. Women’s lives changed, and the thought of sitting hunched over the kitchen table scissoring away at the Daily Bugle suddenly seemed as cost-effective as churning your own butter. Oh, there are some major pockets of coupon-clipping resistance–senior citizens, the highly budget-conscious and motivated, mostly women who aren’t working at jobs all day. But otherwise–outtahere!”
“Under the old division of labor, the job of acquiring fell mainly to women, who did it willingly, ably, systematically. It was … women’s main realm of public life. If, as individuals, they had little influence in the world of business, in the marketplace they collectively called the shots. Shopping gave women a good excuse to sally forth, sometimes even in blissful solitude, beyond the clutches of family.”
“As women’s lives change, their relationship to shopping must evolve. Today most American women hold jobs, so they get all the impersonal, businesslike contact with other adults they want … They also get plenty of time away from the comforts of home. And so the routine shopping trip is no longer the great escape. It’s now something that must be crammed in … Catalogs, TV shopping channels and Web shopping all have flourished thanks mainly to the changes in women’s responsibilities. And the less time they spend in stores, the less they buy there. … Women may even become more male in their shopping habits–hurried hit-and-run artists instead of dedicated browsers and searchers. … women have more money … women have less time and inclination to spend it in stores.”
“Women can go into a kind of reverie when they shop–they become absorbed in the ritual of seeking and comparing, of imagining and envisioning merchandise in use. They then coolly tally up the pros and cons of this purchase over that, and once they’ve found what they want at the proper price, they buy it. Women generally care that they do well in even the smallest act of purchasing, and take pride in their ability to select the perfect thing, whether it’s cantaloupe or a house or a husband.”