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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 1 (April 1, 1936.)
The Sweet Buy and Buy
The Sweet Buy and Buy.
There are many things on which men and women differ, and one of them is shopping.
Shopping is a woman's rite and a man's blight. A man enters a shop feeling like a “lorn sham,” and comes out relling like a shorn lamb. Men shop only when driven into it. Women stop only when driven out of it.
A man, during his daily endeavour, may be an expert exponent of cashas-cash-can, a dead shot on the fields of finance, a mogul of the money-bags, a master-mind in the realms of the minted, and shrewd withal; but the moment he enters a shop his backbone becomes a pillar of plasticine, his head a blob of blancmange, and where there was will there's whey. He becomes a vacillating victim of counter attacks. As soon as the shop-walker gets him fixed on his sights he signals, “Girls! Get your man!”
Then the scented sirens prime up with powder, knock their permanent waves into shape and prepare for action. Even the fifth assistant-improver bobs up for a sitting-shot, and the liftman has to restrain himself from unloading a parcel of shares in a collar-stud mine, because it's altogether too easy.
Such is the deadly influence a shop exerts on the male mind. No wonder shopping statistics say that seventy-five per cent, of men's apparel is purchased by women.
Women are different. When a woman shops she Shops. Otherwise she probably is quite a nice woman. She may be a good wife and mother; she may get home every night in time to slip on an apron and a “hasty pudding”; she may even be one of those super-spouses who darn socks. But as soon as she sights a shop (more especially a draper's shop) her eyes goggle and go glassy. Something seems to come over her; something seems to snap in her brain. She staggers from window to window like one upon whom a flat-iron has been dropped out of a tailor's window. People may be getting run over in the street, the building next door may be on fire, her husband may be spending the gas money on riotous living. Does she wot it? Not a wot! Her candle-power is practically nil.
She is not the woman you took for better or for bitter; she is not the person your children call “mother.” She is a temporary victim of “draper's amnesia,” “lapsis lingerie,” or loss of mum-mery.
While you lean against a post outside, smoking your week's supply of tobacco, she is as lost to you as if she had been swallowed up by the jungles of Borneo.