Groceries and Men, a Dangerous Mix
April 12, 2000
Clay and I recently went grocery shopping together for almost the first time in our 21-year march towards eternity together. You know, I took those promises that we made to love and cherish one another forever as seriously as anyone, but we were young and in love and I never imagined any test would be as hard as this!
For one thing, I see grocery shopping together as the next step before we officially become Ma and Pa Kettle putzing around the yard in our matching pastel stretch knits, but SHOPPING? Shopping is the last bastion of my independence. I know if we start shopping together, Clay will take it over and it will become another “guy” project. In other words, it will become more complicated, it will never get done, and I somehow will wind up being the bad guy. All this, and I’m not too wild about going to the grocery store in the first place.
My friend Ursula says that taking her husband shopping is like taking a small child somewhere. The last time they went to K-Mart, she had to have him paged because he wandered off and got lost and she couldn’t find him anywhere when it was time to go home.
The differences between men and women, however previously well-documented, really come to a head over the details and shopping is nothing if not detail. It’s like this cartoon I saw years ago: he says, “I decide the big issues like whether or not our nuclear capability is up to snuff and she decides the little things like what car we’ll buy.” That’s the way it should be—that’s the natural order of things.
Shopping is too hard for men. Their brains aren’t big enough, they’re too delicate and sensitive, and THEY’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO.
For one thing, they don’t understand pricing. Clay was amazed, for example, when I pointed out to him the other day that per ounce, our brand of margarine is cheaper in the smaller containers than the large. Granted, these prices were set by men, but those were men in their predator, business-guy, take-what-you-can-get-and-see-if-they’ll-fall-for-it mode, not men in their virginal innocent, lamb-among-the-wolves shopping mode. Nature has not equipped men to understand that smaller can be better, and that, for example, a box of laundry soap the same size as your dryer is not only aesthetically disturbing, it’s darn near impossible to get the soap out of the bottom of it when it’s almost empty.
A woman recently confided this miserable tale to me. Ever since they got married it’s been their tradition that she and her husband have shopped together for groceries. Recently he got sick and since she’s been able to go shopping alone, it’s almost impossible for her to hope that he will get well again. She’s thinking about slipping small doses of some exotic, untraceable African poison into his food like those weird parents on ER who keep their children sick. She doesn’t wish him any harm, she just never wants to have to be with him at the check-out stand again.
I can’t take my husband shopping because it’s too hard on him. The wide aisles and bright lights, the marvelous variety of brands and products, the tantalizing smells of the fresh produce are all too exciting for him. I’m afraid that repeated exposure would leave him unbalanced and confused. Also, in his mind, the world stopped somewhere in Heber in 1955 and eggs should still be 10 cents a dozen from a farm stand. He is SO cheap it borders on the insane. He actually confessed to me that when soda pop went over 25 cents a can, he vowed to never buy it. Do you realize that means he’s probably never tasted half the soft drink flavors invented?
A friend of ours at BYU just reconnected with a young woman from the Ukraine who was the first person he baptized on his mission. In the Ukraine she could only buy what they had that day and there was only one brand of anything. Imagine doing all of your shopping in a place the size of a 7-11. But she could do it because she’s a woman and nature has naturally fitted her to deal with problems like this. And when she came to America, she intuitively knew, right away, how to handle a better selection of goods. She made a list, she planned it out, she watched the sales and went over her register receipt on the way out to the car. Men are not able to do these things, they are too impulsive and unable to control themselves around things like Twinkies and those horrible little powdered sugar donuts. And there is not one of them alive that could get from the cash register to the car without losing the receipt.
You don’t have to believe in evolution to know that if men were supposed to shop for food, human beings would run on electricity.
Clay and I recently went grocery shopping together for almost the first time in our 21-year march towards eternity together. You know, I took those promises that we made to love and cherish one another forever as seriously as anyone, but we were young and in love and I never imagined any test would be as hard as this!
For one thing, I see grocery shopping together as the next step before we officially become Ma and Pa Kettle putzing around the yard in our matching pastel stretch knits, but SHOPPING? Shopping is the last bastion of my independence. I know if we start shopping together, Clay will take it over and it will become another “guy” project. In other words, it will become more complicated, it will never get done, and I somehow will wind up being the bad guy. All this, and I’m not too wild about going to the grocery store in the first place.
My friend Ursula says that taking her husband shopping is like taking a small child somewhere. The last time they went to K-Mart, she had to have him paged because he wandered off and got lost and she couldn’t find him anywhere when it was time to go home.
The differences between men and women, however previously well-documented, really come to a head over the details and shopping is nothing if not detail. It’s like this cartoon I saw years ago: he says, “I decide the big issues like whether or not our nuclear capability is up to snuff and she decides the little things like what car we’ll buy.” That’s the way it should be—that’s the natural order of things.
Shopping is too hard for men. Their brains aren’t big enough, they’re too delicate and sensitive, and THEY’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO.
For one thing, they don’t understand pricing. Clay was amazed, for example, when I pointed out to him the other day that per ounce, our brand of margarine is cheaper in the smaller containers than the large. Granted, these prices were set by men, but those were men in their predator, business-guy, take-what-you-can-get-and-see-if-they’ll-fall-for-it mode, not men in their virginal innocent, lamb-among-the-wolves shopping mode. Nature has not equipped men to understand that smaller can be better, and that, for example, a box of laundry soap the same size as your dryer is not only aesthetically disturbing, it’s darn near impossible to get the soap out of the bottom of it when it’s almost empty.
A woman recently confided this miserable tale to me. Ever since they got married it’s been their tradition that she and her husband have shopped together for groceries. Recently he got sick and since she’s been able to go shopping alone, it’s almost impossible for her to hope that he will get well again. She’s thinking about slipping small doses of some exotic, untraceable African poison into his food like those weird parents on ER who keep their children sick. She doesn’t wish him any harm, she just never wants to have to be with him at the check-out stand again.
I can’t take my husband shopping because it’s too hard on him. The wide aisles and bright lights, the marvelous variety of brands and products, the tantalizing smells of the fresh produce are all too exciting for him. I’m afraid that repeated exposure would leave him unbalanced and confused. Also, in his mind, the world stopped somewhere in Heber in 1955 and eggs should still be 10 cents a dozen from a farm stand. He is SO cheap it borders on the insane. He actually confessed to me that when soda pop went over 25 cents a can, he vowed to never buy it. Do you realize that means he’s probably never tasted half the soft drink flavors invented?
A friend of ours at BYU just reconnected with a young woman from the Ukraine who was the first person he baptized on his mission. In the Ukraine she could only buy what they had that day and there was only one brand of anything. Imagine doing all of your shopping in a place the size of a 7-11. But she could do it because she’s a woman and nature has naturally fitted her to deal with problems like this. And when she came to America, she intuitively knew, right away, how to handle a better selection of goods. She made a list, she planned it out, she watched the sales and went over her register receipt on the way out to the car. Men are not able to do these things, they are too impulsive and unable to control themselves around things like Twinkies and those horrible little powdered sugar donuts. And there is not one of them alive that could get from the cash register to the car without losing the receipt.
You don’t have to believe in evolution to know that if men were supposed to shop for food, human beings would run on electricity.
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