Last week I was walking down a shopping street with a female co-worker during a lunch break. While getting nuts of my companion stepping in and out of every possible store one could think of, I started thinking of the classical differences between men and women.

Women are social shoppers: Most women consider shopping to be entertaining and a good waste…uhm…way of spending time. Although this seems highly unthinkable for us men, women seem to enjoy spending their entire day walking in and out of many, many stores. Preferably with some companionship.

In my experience women have a strong wish of recreating a setting which they’ve taken from an idealistic image. For instance, if one of their role models goes out shopping in their favourite soap, women feel the need to imitate that behaviour themselves. If they see a commercial of a product they feel related too, they will probably be emotionally stimulated to recreate that commercial in their own lives. This is an aspect that many men do not have that strongly. Men simply don’t identify themselves with commercial images that fast. They’d rather be sceptical and interpret the commercial as being foolish. That being said, I’m certain that today’s commercials are way more fixed on women than on men. Maybe advertisement companies also found men harder to influence.

Men are also more minimalistic. They have the ability to feel good in less comfortable situations. While during an mild autumn day, women “have to” wear a scarf, gloves, hat and coat, of course according to the latest fashion and whatnot. Men will feel content with just a thick sweater bought 2 years ago. And maybe a standard issue winter coat. If you compare this to times where people had to hunt to survive, men had to keep moving and be agile all the time in order to hunt efficiently. Women stayed at the cave, gathering herbs and creating a “home-like” environment. Because women had less physical exercise they needed more exterior aid in order to stay warm and alive. Maybe men were built to have better ways of staying warm and comfortable in non-idealistic environments.

Men (with exceptions of course) generally think a lot of their financial future. They sacrifice fun today, for security tomorrow. I think women live more in the present. If they don’t feel good they have to solve the problem. Many times by buying something to fix the problem. Whether or not this actually does fix the problem is another discussion entirely *grin*. Also Men are lazier than women which fortunately is also a great way to not spend money on shopping. Men simply can’t be motivated to walk for 2 hours without a real purpose. They’d rather do something extremely useful as drinking beer and watching football!

Image via Wikipedia

Although it may seem that women have dominant shopping behaviour. Men could very well spend equal amounts of money on average. However, men tend to spend money on larger stuff like electronics, cars and other objects they could ever find an excuse for to really “need”!

Have fun shopping!