Shopping and foraging

A gender dichotomy

I hate shopping, except for food. That I love. I can spend days wandering around food markets, and often do so in cities and towns that still have them. But I haven’t bought clothes in years. Fortunately, my spouse, embarrassed by my shabbiness, does an annual run to Nordstrom, returning home with a selection of slacks and shirts. She lays them out for me, I choose a couple with a sideways glance, and she returns the rest to the store. Even that experience is barely tolerable. Since retirement, my need for style has decreased, so now her trips are to REI or other outdoor stores. Essentials, like socks and shoes, are bought online. Furniture shopping is even more painful than shopping for clothes, but fortunately, this is a rare occurrence following our various relocations.

We are now well past the half-century mark of our marriage. In part, this is a result of learning how to avoid two joint activities. The first was racing on the same sailboat, and the second was shopping together. The sailing one ended first. As crew, my spouse had a habit of turning to me, the skipper, mid-race, and asking, “Why is that boat over there going faster than us?” “That’s your problem,” I’d yell back over the wind, “you’re supposed to be trimming the sails, telling me what the tide’s doing, and being encouraging and upbeat — pick any two.” We have not raced together since. It was, in retrospect, the more survivable of the two activities.

Going into any store together is always a recipe for discord. “We are here to buy just two things,” I would grunt. She, bless her heart, would wander off and soon I would hear, ‘Oh, come and look at this; or don’t we need this gizmo; or isn’t this cute.” No!” I always snap back, “We are leaving.” We are rarely actually leaving. We are negotiating the terms of our departure, which may take another 20 minutes.

This aversion to shopping may have arisen during my childhood. Our family, while not poor, had limited means and certainly not enough to afford much in the way of luxury. These were the olden days when the downtown stores had elaborate window displays to lure customers. A favorite pastime of my parents was to take us into the city to go ‘window shopping’, usually in the evening or on weekends when the stores were closed. It made no sense to me. Why gawk at things one could not afford? It seemed as point-less to me then as watching HGTV does now. However I suspect that there is more to it, hidden in the genes. Specifically, I lack a second X chromosome, and the Y chromosome I harbor sports an anti-shopping gene with very high penetrance.

Some will immediately accuse me of being sexist, but I have data to back up my bias and prejudice. During our time in Washington State, we frequented a health club located in the resort where we had built our dream retirement home. It was a lovely facility, and after working out, I would lounge in the large lobby reading the New York Times and rehydrating with coffee. That is where I noted a curious phenomenon. I actually conducted an uncontrolled, unblinded, entirely unscientific observational study. Every time a woman entered the building, she immediately gravitated towards the gift store, rummaged through the racks of high-end yoga clothing or swimsuits, and then finally sauntered over to registration. Not once in four years did I ever observe a man engage in such foraging behavior. I am sure there are some men who love to shop.

Most of my mushroom foraging was done either solo or with a trusted male companion, but there were times when I was part of a group, and it was then that I noticed different strategies. The anthropological literature extensively reports on differences in food gathering, primarily among hunter-gatherer societies. These have documented very different roles between the sexes. There is one published scientific study of which I am aware that has actually looked at the difference between men and women scavenging for fungi in non-subsistence groups, and it confirms my observations. Foraging in the same habitat women tend to be more deliberate and move more slowly, while the men rush around like maniacs from one likely spot to the next. At the end of the day both have collected equal amounts, but the men are exhausted and have burned many more calories.(Evolution and Human Behavior. Volume 31, Issue 4, July 2010, Pages 289-297. Sex differences in mushroom gathering: men expend more energy to obtain equivalent benefits)

In the interest of full disclosure, however, my own dataset contains a significant shopping outlier. Point me toward the camping aisle of an outdoor store and I will vanish for the better part of an afternoon, fondling carabiners I do not need, reading the specifications of headlamps I will never use above 200 lumens. Even worse is an art store where I can spend hours comparing the specific pigments in each tube of new gamboge.

I do not call this shopping. I call it “research,” a word men deploy the way a magician deploys a cape: to make the thing disappear. A man comparing horsepower figures for a truck he isn’t buying for another two years isn’t shopping. He’ll tell you he’s doing due diligence. A man reading sixty product reviews of a flashlight isn’t shopping; he’s being thorough. It is, of course, exactly the foraging I described at the health club, conducted at one-tenth the speed and with three times the self-righteousness.

One weekend, I participated in one of those art-and-craft fairs that I recently took a sworn oath never to do again. However, it was sponsored by the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, and I saw it as a way to donate and get rid of old paintings languishing on shelves and under the bed. I carefully organized the booth, prominently displaying what I considered my best work on the boards. And on the table, I stacked the rest. A ‘junk pile’.

To my dismay (and considerable pleasure), about 90% of what I sold was salvaged from the ‘junk’ pile. Women walked into the booth, scanned the boards, then immediately gravitated to the stack of paintings and began flipping through them. “Oh, I like this one,” she would say to her friend, and I knew I had made a sale.

Later in the day, as the crowds diminished, I commented about this to the adjacent vendor, a jewelry seller who had had a good day. “I always do that when I go shopping. I never even look at what’s on display”. Apparently, it’s all part of the thrill of the hunt, the surprise of discovery. Even though I now know the secret to selling, I promise never to participate in such an event again.

As we look ahead to another decade, or two, of marriage, Vivien and I intend to keep doing exactly what’s worked so far: separate boats, separate aisles, and shopping carts that never, under any circumstances, touch.