CHAPTER 1 - University of Exeter

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Chapter 3 – The Shopping Experience
jobs, women entering the work force etc.), have started to reclaim their masculinity
by means of compensatory consumption. In sum, past research points to the fact that
it is not just women who engage actively in consumption, but that men do so as well.
However, there still are very strong perceptions surrounding shopping and they all
define shopping as a female activity, and mere engagement in shopping does not
equal enjoyment of the activity.
Previous research by the principal investigator (Hoeger, Young and
Schroeder, 2006) has indicated that men and women may have very similar concepts
of what shopping is as an activity (see Chapter 5 for a more in-depth discussion on
this), even though other researchers have found that men in general do not perceive
their consumption activities to be shopping (Tuncay, 2007, personal
communication). This could be due to the fact that they want to distinguish
themselves from women and feminine behaviours (Campbell, 1997). Moreover, even
though men and women seem to have very similar concepts when asked about
shopping in general there still seem to be differences in how men and women
perceive shopping as an activity they engage in themselves. That is, men and women
may think about their shopping activities in very different terms. Men might not
consider their consumption activities to be shopping, while women freely agree that
they engage in shopping and that they enjoy it. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Tauber
(1972) investigated different motivations for shopping to determine whether
shopping involved more than simply making purchases. He found that people have
very different motivations, some are personal and others are social. Tauber (1972)
did not address whether there were any difference between men and women and their
shopping motivations. His sample consisted of an equal number of men and women,
so he could have made an assessment of the differences between men and women.