Men buy, women shop

One of the better articles i have come across on gender shopping ways.

Men shop as hunters, women shop as gatherers

Men, who have often been accused of being merely replacement shoppers, tend to be more utilitarian when they hit the malls and shopping centers. It's a mission. Get in. Get what's needed. Get out. Quickly.

Women, on the other hand, generally like to look around, talk to sales associates and experience the shopping. They walk around, smell perfume, touch clothes, dab on cosmetics. They want attention and they want direction.

Men are very task oriented while women are very much more about the relationship and the engagement and the interaction with the people at the stores.
"Don't point me in the direction and say aisle 6," one man said during the study. "It's better if he takes me and says, 'There it is.'"

Women told surveyors that they liked it when associates showed them different styles and new items. "I told her what I was looking for and why and she set out to find me the right suit," said one woman. "I didn't have to do anything."

And this might not be terribly surprising either: Women run into more problems when shopping than men. On the tribulations scale, women's No. 1 issue was not being able to find help when they needed it. One in three women who were so miffed by the issue that they said they would never go back to the store again.

Men's biggest headache: Parking. One in three said they hated not finding parking close to the store entrance. But very few of them said they would desert the store forever because of it.

The clerk factor
Twenty percent of women said they were ignored by sales clerks, mostly because they thought the clerks were more interested in talking with each other about their weekend plans or were on the phone with friends. A whopping 47% of those women said they would never go back to that store.
"Being ignored is a big issue for women," Courtney said. "It's a loyalty issue."
Men ditch stores, too, but their biggest reason to do so is when products are out of stock. Men complained they experienced that when shopping 24% of the time compared with it happening to women 21% of the time.

But here's the real kicker: Of those men who complained, 43% said they would never shop at those stores again; only 16% of women cited that as a reason to stay away. Some people did go back to stores they vowed never to return to -- less than one-third, according to the study -- but it took them close to a year to do so.

Both men and women told that they really appreciated a "lack of pressure" when store employees were willing to let them shop at their own pace.

Age made a difference, too, in shopper loyalty. The younger the shopper, the more likely he or she was to pooh-pooh a store for poor service. The pickiest of all groups were men 18 years old to 35 years old. "I'm not going to tell them that they're messing up," one guy said. "Let them lose business. I just won't go back."

Women and men both are four times more likely to relay a good-news experience than a bad one.

Still, when all is said and done, women are the shopping queens. They spend an eye-popping $4 trillion annually, which accounts for 83% of U.S. consumer spending.