Women Love to Shop

It’s one of the oldest stereotypes, but it’s also probably one of the most accurate: WOMEN LOVE TO SHOP.

Men, on the other hand, don’t seem generally all that excited by the activity. There are, of course, some men who enjoy the browsing the racks as much as women (if not more) but many just appear to tolerate it, while some outright can’t stand the thought of shopping!

But the fact that women like to shop more than men is not just an empty stereotype — there is actually some scientific data to back it up. Back in 2013, researchers conducted a survey on British people and discovered that men get bored with shopping after just 26 minutes.

Women, meanwhile, are generally pretty happy shopping for hours before they start to get bored or stressed out. In my case, I tend to only get fed up when I can’t find what I am looking for, when shops become too crowded, or when my other half starts moaning about being bored or hungry.

Why is it that I love to try on every pair of shoes before deciding whether to buy anything at all, and my husband wants to get out of the mall seconds after we get in?

It's all in the genes!

According to Daniel Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan. Kruger argues that it's natural for women to love to shop and men to hate it because of our evolutionary past. Men were the hunters in our ancestral cultures, so when they find a satisfactory specimen, whether it's an elk or a pair of shoes, they want to shoot it and get out before it gets away. On the other hand, women were the primary gatherers in early hunter-gatherer cultures, so they feel a need to check every berry on the bush to make sure they are getting the best deal.

Polly Young-Eisendrath, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Vermont, puts forward the theory that today’s method of shopping is simply an offshoot of advertising and commercialism that was created by corporations to encourage women to feel in charge.

As commercialism grew and grew, advertisers continued to tell women that shopping was a liberating way to act on one’s own desires and control one’s destiny. The phenomenon is depressing in retrospect, but I have got to admit it is something of a power-trip when I hand over my credit card at the cash register. It feels fantastic to be able to buy something what I want, when I want it….even if the power I feel is but a problematic illusion.