Why Women Love to Shop

Shopping, A Woman’s Instinct

If there’s one thing that men admit to not being able to fathom, it is women and their ways. And, one of those ways is how they could flit from one shop to another the whole day just shopping when they complain to just a couple of hours in the gym. There is no question that women loves to shop just about anything from clothes, to shoes, to bags, beauty products, home decors, books, kitchen utensils—just everything. Shopping for women does not just entail buying. It includes the whole ritual of browsing, comparing one product with another, canvassing for discounts and sale, paying attention to details, fitting countless clothes and shoes and whatever else women does when they go shopping.

It is interesting to note that women do not just shop for what they can afford but also what they cannot afford. If they like something, a pair of pumps perhaps but cannot afford it, they would simply wait for months until the shoes go on sale or until they could save enough to buy it. When they see what they want to buy, women do not easily get deterred. Experts try to pinpoint the reason why women love to shop. An article on Discovery news reported that Daniel Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor, Michigan, claimed it is in the women’s gene, a result of their evolutionary past wherein while men hunted, the women foraged.

In the same report, Kruger’s study was, however, refuted by human behavioral ecologist Rebecca Bird who said that “it's ridiculous and naive to assume that there's a gene for vegetable procurement or for navigation through a mall.” According to another study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the answer to women’s urge to shop is hormones. It has been suggested in the study done by the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management entitled "Ovulation, Female Competition, and Product Choice: Hormonal Influences on Consumer Behavior," that ovulating women are far more likely to spend money on sexy clothes than women at a different point in their monthly cycle. Yet, another study commissioned by Debenhams, a high-end department store, claims women have their mothers to blame for their addiction to shopping. Women are accordingly taught to shop through years of exposure to high levels of fashion and shopping.

Whatever the reasons are, most women would claim that shopping is their anti-depressant. A safer way to treat depression than popping a pill, I’d say.