Sunday 23 March 2008

Retail Apathy


I've gone on about shopping quite a bit already (e.g. here and here), but my recent experience of trailing behind a woman in a shopping mecca causes me to revisit this topic (again!).

I (mercifully) hadn't done this for quite some time, but the natural male response wasn't long kicking in again. As the graph above shows, the (straight, average) man's tolerance for shopping is very low, in the order of minutes. On the other hand, the (average) woman's tolerance for spending/browsing/trying on stuff approaches the age of the universe!!!

After about 20 minutes the average man has just about had enough. He has found his target items, tried them on (if absolutely necessary!) and purchased them. If he is alone, great - he can leave. However, if the poor guy is accompanied by his beloved, the nightmare is only beginning! He can kill a few more minutes eyeing up the females in the shops or browsing in the lingerie section, but even this gets tedious pretty quickly. After about 40 minutes, he really, really wants to leave. Unfortunately, he must persevere and hope that saying everything looks great on her will expedite the process!

After an hour, he starts getting narky and drops "subtle" hints about calling it a day. Undeterred, she soldiers on as his protestations fall on deaf ears. At the 2 hour mark, he suffers retail meltdown and world war 3 breaks out on the shop floor!! The moral of the story? Obviously, never go shopping with your woman unless you want to engineer a break up fight with her!!