Or so the traditional world of retail maintains. Baloney. Although women are increasingly reaching high-level business positions, we live in a world that is owned by men, designed by men and managed by men, yet somehow they expect women to participate. That they don’t get women is a given; that they don’t do so well with the guys either is pathetic. Here are the two basic building blocks: Guys are genetically disposed to be hunters, so they walk to the woods and are unsuccessful unless they can kill something reasonably quickly and drag it back home and through the mudroom. Women are gatherers who get immense pleasure out of the act of looking. Thus, two women can spend the day at the mall, buy nothing and have a wonderful time.
Women do have a greater affinity for what we think of as “shopping”—walking at a relaxed pace through stores, examining merchandise, comparing products and values, interacting with sales staff, asking questions, trying things on and ultimately making purchases. Most acquisitioning 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. Historically, women were the culture’s everyday purchasing agents and took 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—they’re becoming a lot more like men in that regard—but they’re still the primary buyers in the American marketplace.
Men, in comparison, are more reckless, less poetical. We’ve timed enough shoppers to know that men always move faster than women through a store’s aisles. Men spend less time looking, too. In many settings it’s hard to get them to look at anything they hadn’t intended to buy. They usually don’t like asking where things are, or any other questions, for that matter. (They shop the way they drive.) If a man can’t find the section he’s looking for, he’ll wheel about once or twice, then give up and leave the store without ever asking for help. You can see him just shut down.
You’ll see a man move impatiently through a store to the section he wants, pick something up, and then, almost abruptly, he’s ready to buy, having taken little apparent joy in the process of finding. A classic example was watching some older guys shopping for Dockers—the Levi Strauss line of basic khakis and chinos. The image of the guy racing to the Dockers wall, finding a pair that matched his specs—thirty-four-inch waist and thirty-two-inch inseam—and turning and almost running to the register is pretty commonplace. It’s as if the sheer fact of being in the store is a threat to his masculinity. It’s funny that stores like Cabela’s, REI and even the bricks-and-mortar versions of L.L.Bean make it much easier for older guys to shop for belts, pants and underwear, since they’re surrounded by the trappings of fishing, hunting and outdoor exercise. Another example is the Harley-Davidson dealer, where not only do middle-aged guys shop for clothes, but you can sell them stuff for their kids, too.
But when a typical guy is shopping, you’ve practically got to get out of his way because otherwise he’ll flatten you. When a man takes clothing into a dressing room, the only thing that stops him from buying it is if it doesn’t fit. Women, on the other hand, try things on only as part of the consideration process, and garments that fit just fine may still be rejected on other grounds. In one study, we found that 65 percent of male shoppers who tried something on bought it, as opposed to 25 percent of female shoppers. This is a good argument for positioning fitting rooms nearer the men’s department than the women’s, if they are shared accommodations. If they are not, men’s dressing rooms should be near the entrance and very clearly marked, because if he has to search for it, he may just decide it’s not worth the trouble.
Here’s another statistical comparison: Eighty-six percent of women look at price tags when they shop. Only 72 percent of men do. For a man, ignoring the price tag is almost a measure of his virility. As a result, men are far more easily upgraded than are women shoppers. They are also far more suggestible than women—men seem so anxious to get out of the store that they’ll say yes to almost anything.
Now, a shopper such as that could be seen as more trouble than he’s worth. But he could also be seen as a potential source of profits, especially given his lack of discipline. Either way, men now do more purchasing than ever before. And that figure will continue to grow. As they stay single longer than ever, they learn to shop for things their fathers never had to buy. And because many marry women who work as long and hard as they do, they will be forced to shoulder more of the burden of shopping. The manufacturers and retailers and display designers who pay attention to male ways, and are willing to adapt the shopping experience to them, will have an edge in the coming decades.
The great traditional arena for male shopping behavior has always been the supermarket. It’s here, with thousands of products all 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 inexperienced husband to the supermarket unchaperoned. Giving him a vehicle to commandeer, even if it is just a shopping cart, only emphasizes the potential for guyness in the experience. 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. Part of being Daddy is being the provider, after all. It goes to the heart of a man’s self-image.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life watching men moving through supermarkets. One of my favorite video moments starred a dad carrying his little daughter on his shoulders. In the snacks aisle, the girl gestures toward the animal crackers display. Dad grabs a box off the shelf, opens it, and hands it up—without even a thought to the fact that his head and shoulders are about to be dusted with cookie crumbs. It’s hard to imagine Mom in such a wanton scenario. Another great lesson in male shopping came about watching a man and his two small sons pass through the cereal aisle. When the boys plead for their favorite brand, he pulls down a box and instead of carefully opening it along the reclosable tab, he just rips the top, knowing full well that once the boys start in, there won’t be any need to reclose it.
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. But men are particularly suggestible to the entreaties of children as well as eye-catching displays.
There’s another profligate male behavior that invariably shows itself at supermarkets, something we see over and over on video we shoot at the registers: The man almost always pays. Especially when a man and woman are shopping together, he insists on whipping out his wad and forking it over, lest the cashier mistakenly think it’s the woman of the house who’s bringing home the bacon. No wonder that retailers commonly call men wallet carriers, or that the conventional wisdom is sell to the woman, close to the man. Because while the man may not love the experience of shopping, he gets a definite thrill from the experience of paying. It allows him to feel in charge even when he isn’t. Stores that sell prom gowns depend on this. Generally, when Dad’s along, the girl will get a pricier frock than if just Mom were there with her.
One of my favorite stores is American Girl Place, which has to be one of the best engines ever invented to take money out of Daddy’s pocket. For anyone who doesn’t know what American Girl Place is, it’s a doll store, where dolls are themed to moments in American history, with skin tone and hair color to match, as well as an era-appropriate name, like Addy or Felicity, plus a brief bio. You can buy matching outfits for both the doll and your nine-year-old. The store also features a beauty parlor where you can get your doll’s hair done, a doll
hospital, a café with a special seat where your doll can join you for tea, and even a theater where the story behind each doll is dramatized. Add on books and magazines, and the average visitor has dropped a couple of hundred bucks. The café has five seatings a day and most weekends are booked out six months in advance. It’s the dream birthday present for many American eight-or nine-year-old girls to convince their parents to take them to American Girl Place for the weekend. There are now three stores—the original in Chicago, followed by New York and Los Angeles. The only improvement I can think of would be an American Girl Place Hotel, or maybe an American Girl Place Floor at a nearby hotel complete with doll beds and nightgowns. I love taking foreign visitors there. The question we debate is whether a French Girl Place or a Japanese Girl Place would be as successful a way of getting money out of Daddy’s pocket as its U.S. counterpart.
In certain categories, men shoppers put women to shame. We ran a study for a store where 17 percent of the male customers we interviewed said they visited the place more than once a week! Almost one quarter of the men there said they had left the house that day with no intention of visiting the store—they just found themselves wandering in out of curiosity. The fact that it was a computer store may have had something to do with it, of course. Computer hardware and software have taken the place of cars and stereo equipment as the focus of male love of technology and gadgetry. Clearly, most of the visits to the store were information-gathering forays. On the videotape, we watched the men reading intently the software packaging and any other literature or signage available. The store was where men bought software, but it was also where they did most of their learning about it. This underscores another male shopping trait: Just as they hate to ask directions from sales staff, they like to get their information firsthand, preferably from written materials, instructional videos or computer screens.
A few years back we ran a study for a wireless phone provider that was developing a prototype retail store. And we found that men and women used the place in very different ways. Women would invariably walk right up to the sales desk and ask staffers questions about the phones and the various deals being offered. Men, however, went directly to the phone displays and the signs that explained the agreements. They then took brochures and application forms and left the store—all without ever speaking to an employee. When these men returned to the store, it was to sign up. The women, though, on average required a third visit to the store, and more consultation, before they were ready to close.
Women’s and men’s roles, of course, are changing. In 2008, the overwhelming majority of students attending institutions of higher learning was female. And it’s not just undergraduate education, law school and medical school; women now dominate almost every graduate program except engineering and math. While income disparity is still biased toward men and the glass ceiling is still an obstacle in most professions, never have women had more money of their own than they do right now.
But for the most part, men are still the ones who take the lead when shopping for cars (though women have a big say in most new-car purchases), and men and women perform the division of labor you’d expect when buying for the home: She buys anything that goes inside, and he buys everything that goes outside—mower and other gardening and lawn-care equipment, barbecue grill, water hose and so on.
But let’s put those historic roles into some sort of demographic perspective. In the 2002 U.S. Census, only 24 percent of American households had a mother, a father and dependent children. Roughly 15 percent of households consisted of a single parent raising his or her kids. That leaves a huge 60 percent of American households with no kids (some childless, some empty nesters), and the rest nontraditional: roommates, adult kids living with their parents, singles and so on. The basic idea of what we sell to whom is still valid, but paying attention to the nontraditional buyers of everything has never been more important. Roughly half the cars on the road in North America are driven by women. Yet the car dealership remains one of the most hated destinations for women shoppers.
One of the most telling disconnects is in housing, where almost all new homes built in the past ten years have been based around the concept of the nuclear family: one master bedroom and a couple of smaller kiddie rooms. If you have a home that’s configured for a nontraditional living unit—for example, with two master bedroom suites—it will sell faster and at a premium.
All across the world it takes two incomes to live a middle-class life. In 1965 when my father bought a home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, that home cost approximately his annual salary. He made forty thousand dollars a year and the house cost the same. Today if anyone lives in a house that’s equal to his or her annual income, I don’t know whether to be envious or sympathetic. That said, the decision-making process of where we spend our money is in flux.
Even when men aren’t shopping, they figure prominently into the experience. As I mentioned earlier, we know that across the board, how much customers buy is a direct result of how much time they spend in a store. And our research has shown over and over that when a woman is in a store with a man, she’ll spend less time there than when she’s alone or with another woman, or even with children. Here’s the actual breakdown of average shopping time from a study we performed at one branch of a national housewares chain:
Woman shopping with a female companion: 8 minutes, 15 seconds
Woman with children: 7 minutes, 19 seconds
Woman alone: 5 minutes, 2 seconds
Woman with man: 4 minutes, 41 seconds
In each case, what’s happening seems clear: When two women shop together, they talk, advise, suggest and consult to their hearts’ content, hence the long time in the store; with the kids, she’s partly consumed with herding them along and keeping them entertained; alone, she makes efficient use of her time. But with him—well, he makes it plain that he’s bored and antsy and liable at any moment to go off and sit in the car and listen to the radio or stand outside and watch girls. So the woman’s comfort level plummets when he’s by her side; she spends the entire trip feeling anxious and rushed. If he can somehow be occupied, though, she’ll be a happier, more relaxed shopper. And she’ll spend more, both time and money. There are two main strategies for coping with the presence of men in places where serious shopping is being done.
The first one is passive restraint, which is not to say handcuffs. Stores that sell mainly to women should all be figuring out some way to engage the interest of men. If I owned Chico’s or Victoria’s Secret, I’d have a place where a woman could check her husband like a coat. There already exists a traditional space where men have always felt comfortable waiting around—it’s called the barbershop. Instead of some ratty old chairs and back issues of Playboy and Boxing Illustrated, maybe there could be comfortable seats facing a big-screen TV tuned to ESPN, or the cable channel that runs the bass-fishing program. Even something that simple would go a long way toward relieving wifely anxiety, but it’s possible to imagine more: Sports Illustrated in-store programming, for instance—a documentary on the making of the swimsuit issue, perhaps—or highlights of last weekend’s NFL action.
If I were opening a brand-new store where women could shop comfortably, I’d find a location right next to an emporium devoted to male desire—a computer store, for instance, or a car-parts supply house, somewhere he could happily kill half an hour. Likewise, if I were opening a computer software store, I’d put it next to a women’s clothing shop and guarantee myself hordes of grateful male browsers.
But you could also try to sell to your captive audience. A women’s clothing store could prepare a video catalog designed especially for men buying gifts—items like scarves or robes rather than shoes or trousers. Gift certificates would sell easily there; he already knows that she likes the store. Victoria’s Secret could really go to town with a video catalog for men. They could even stage a little fashion show.
The only precaution you’d need to take is in where to place such a section. You want cu
stomers to be able to find it easily, but you don’t want it so near the entrance that the gaze of window shoppers falls on six lumpy guys in windbreakers slumped in Barcaloungers watching TV.
The second, and ultimately more satisfying, strategy would be to find a way to actually get the man involved in shopping. Not the easiest thing to do in certain categories, but not impossible either.
We were doing a study for Pfaltzgraff, the dinnerware maker and retailer. Their typical customer will fall in love with one particular pattern and collect the entire set—-many, many pieces, everything from dinner plates and coffee cups to a mustard pot, serving platter and napkin rings. It is very time-consuming to shop the store, especially when you figure in how long it takes to ring the items up and wrap them so that they don’t break. Just the kind of situation designed to drive most men nuts. But the typical sale at Pfaltzgraff outlet stores can run into the hundreds of dollars, all the more reason to find a way to get men involved.
As we watched the videotape, we noticed that for some unknown reason men were tending to wander over toward the glassware section of the store. They were steering clear of the gravy boats and the spoon rests and drifting among the tumblers and wineglasses. At one point we saw two guys meander over to the beer glasses, where one of them picked one up and with the other hand grabbed an imaginary beer tap, pulled it and tilted the glass as if to fill it. And I thought, well, of course—when company’s over for dinner and the woman’s cooking in the kitchen, what does the man do? He makes drinks. That’s his socially acceptable role. And so he’s interested in all the accoutrements, all the tools of the bartending trade—every different type of glass and what it’s for, and the corkscrew and ice tongs and knives and shakers. They’re being guys about it.
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