Men And Shopping: It’s Not A Natural Pairing
It was time to go Christmas shopping and Neil Dunn was a man with a plan. Destination: Burlington (Mass.) Mall. Exact location: Lord & Taylor. Materials needed: newspaper, magazine, car radio, wife Marian.
Dunn, 62, copped a prime parking spot, bid his wife “happy shopping” and settled into the driver’s seat for a two-hour sitting spree.
Yes, Neil Dunn, college professor, is one of those guys.
You’ve seen them. They snooze in the station wagon, camp out on mall benches or stand in the TV department watching football on a sea of screens. They’re the husbands who hate to shop.
And like so many of his shopping-shy brethren - statistics show 70 percent of shopping mall customers are women - Dunn doubtless will be thanked for Christmas gifts he never picked out, perhaps never even saw, and that’s just fine with him.
“She knows what she’s doing in there, in that jungle. I don’t. I’d just be a human appendage,” said Dunn, as he tuned in a radio talk show and perused the business page. “I would imagine there will be more guys in their cars in the coming weeks, as more of us get shanghaied into coming here.”
According to marketing and trend analysts, humorists, writers, sociologists and many men interviewed, shopping is simply not a guy thing, and the numbers prove it.
At any given time in a shopping mall, women outnumber men by more than 2 to 1, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. But, on Christmas Eve, analysts say, men outnumber women in malls 4 to 1. Procrastination, apparently, is a guy thing.
Theories vary on why Christmas shopping especially divides the sexes: Men are hunters, women tend to graze. Men are flustered by chaos, women thrive in it. Men like goal-oriented tasks, women like process-oriented activities.
Or, as humorist and writer Regina Barecca likes to say, “Men think Santa is on the wife’s side of the family. These are the same guys who sit in the car when their wives go to church. They say, ‘Say hi to God for me - you know him better than I do.”’
Barecca, a professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Connecticut and author of “Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales,” noted that men like to shop when they’re interested in the product. Sporting goods, tools, TVs and tires turn them on, she said.
“Guys have all the patience in the world when they’re in Home Depot; it’s guy mecca,” she said. “They feel when they are there, they are looking for stuff that’s useful, so it justifies their shopping. To them, buying Christmas presents is frivolous, a girl thing. But buying a washer for under the sink is considered useful.”
Kathleen Seiders, a marketing professor at Babson College in Wellesley, said women are better shoppers because they treat shopping as a complex task that has to be done carefully to be done right. Women dress for shopping, make lists, compare prices and “steel themselves for going into battle.”
Men, she said, get overwhelmed too easily by the crowded aisles, ‘sale’ signs, noise, music and the mountains of merchandise. They want to get in, get their stuff and get out.
“Common wisdom among retailers is that if you don’t put the product in the window where the men can see it, or by the door where they can get it and get out fast, they won’t come in,” Seiders said. “Men need big bright signs that say, ‘Hey, guys! Here are the jackets!’ They don’t want ambiguity and confusion.”
To be fair, some men do like to shop. They accompany their wives through the stores, dutifully carrying the shopping bags and making helpful suggestions about whether Aunt Millie really needs another leopard print headband.
Patricia DeSalvo would not want a husband like that, however. She likes her Sal to sit on his bench outside of Filene’s and hold the bags that she brings out to him. She doesn’t want him following her around, complaining that he’s hot, that the bags are too heavy, that she’s spending too much money.
“The only time I want him to be with me is when I find something I like that I want him to buy me,” said DeSalvo. “Otherwise, he’s very good at sitting on this bench and carrying the bags out to the car. He’s had a lot of practice.”
Sal DeSalvo, a retired engineer, said there’s a lot of bonding that goes on between the men on the benches. “People are so nice this time of year, they like to talk,” said DeSalvo, 68. “Why would I want to be in the crowd looking at a bunch of stuff when I can be out here relaxing with the guys?”
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Doreen Iudica Vigue The Boston Globe