Guy Shopping

I don’t know abut you, but I hate shopping.  I hate walking around looking at shelves upon shelves of stuff, most of it over-priced, and sometimes looking like it had been run over by the truck that delivered it (no really, why did someone think to put that on the shelf?).

Perhaps I’m just in the minority here.  A lot of women I know absolutely love to shop.  But that’s just it: I’m a guy.

The typical woman has a list of five or six things she wants to get.  So she enters the store and immediately goes to the opposite side from where the items in question are located.  On the way there, she passes through as many shoe and clothing areas as she can, especially baby clothes.  Even if she has no children, or her children are too big for baby clothes, she looks through them.  If you're unfortunate enough to be a man accompanying her on this excursion, it is your duty to see that she purchases none of the items that are “Soooooo cute!”.  And you know she will if left to herself in that aisle.  If you try to tell her that she doesn’t have kids (or at least none that can wear those), she typically gets defensive, and/or insists that one of her friends who does have children of the appropriate age would love them.  It could be some pathological need to nurture found in women that makes them sappy like that.  Of course, they could just be insane, but I digress.

After about two or three hours, she will have made it over to the other side of the store.  During this time, she will have also lost the initial list of five or six “things to get” under the cart-load of shoes and baby clothes.  So she goes ahead and gets whatever.  Finally… you go to the checkout lanes, make the purchase, and leave the store.  Then she turns to you and says, “Ooo!  There’s a 20% off sale at JC Penny’s!”  All you can do is sigh heavily.

This is what my sister would do when we were younger.  She’d drag us (my brother and I) around to different stores, searching, hunting as it were, for that “great deal”.  If the number of items she purchased on this hunt was any indication, I should think the “great deal” is about as elusive as an unwashed body at an Occupy rally.

I kid, I kid… she didn’t buy THAT much crap.

To contrast, I give you Guy Shopping:

He thinks up two or three things he wants.  As he enters the store, he steers directly toward these items, while simultaneously taking note of which aisles are more congested than others.  This is because guys slowly lose their souls while spending time inside a store, and thus like to make an exit strategy so as to limit that time.  He notices where the old people are blocking aisles, and where women are talking about that adorable outfit, and the special going on when she bought it.  He takes note of the guys with these women standing with heads lowered and hands in pockets, trying to be unobtrusive so as to not be dragged into the conversation and have their souls sucked out even more by their excessive time spent in the store.  He feels their pain, but it’s not his problem; after all, he’s Guy Shopping.

He locates and acquires the items he intended to find, and immediately makes his way down the path he planned on the way in.  He pauses only briefly to take one last look on his fallen comrades who have now been successfully included as a conversational topic, meaning they could no longer politely ignore it.  With a final swelling feeling of “sucks to be you”, he gets to the least crowded checkout lane, purchases his items, and heads directly to the car.  Once there, he checks the time and comments to nobody in particular, “Forty seconds.  Not bad, not bad.”