< http://argument.independent.co.uk > Shopological 24 August 2001 Internal links Shopping is bad for men, claims study The purpose of academic research being to find out what we already know, a BBC programme called Shopology has commissioned a study which discovered that shopping is bad for men's health. We all know that men get palpitations at the thought of asking a shop assistant for advice and would rather buy the wrong thing or nothing at all. We all know a man, or have even been that person, who has set off to buy the Christmas presents for the family and returned with a book and a CD for themselves. Only men are embarrassed to refer to a shopping list in public. It is also safe to assume that the sufferers from shop rage, the one in five among us Britons who gets annoyed while spending an average of three days a year standing in a queue, are overwhelmingly male. (Never mind that one-fifth, even in a nation so allegedly fond of queuing, seems an absurdly small proportion.) What, however, is the explanation for the sexual differential in our reactions to the sight of a cash register? It is of course simple. The main reason men's blood pressure rises when shopping is because the experience is so unfamiliar to them.
