Basket cases

I’ve been doing my own grocery shopping ever since I went away to college and I have noticed that in the past 20 or so years, little has changed in men’s grocery shopping dispositions.

They are still secretly freaked out by it.

For a man, being in a grocery store with nothing but a cart and a list is like venturing into alien territory in a golf cart armed only with a squirt gun. You’re quite sure you won’t die but you might as well, since the anxiety brought on by traversing such unknown frontiers is more than enough to kill you, not to mention the fact that it’s full of judgmental women who are gloating at your ignorance of the mission that was doomed to failure at the onset, compounded by the fact that your mission commander with the most volatile of tempers — the indisposed wife who had entrusted you with this idiot-proof task — awaits you and your purchases at home.

We can put a man in a spacesuit, shoot him into the galaxy and he’ll happily play golf on the moon, but give him a list and put him in the controls of a shopping cart, and Houston, we do have a problem. 

The trick is to never ever put yourself in this position in the first place. Bribe the wife, fight her off, humor her, and turn cartwheels for her — whatever — just so you don’t have to set yourself up for failure in the grocery store.

Sure, more and more men are doing the shopping because more and more women are entering the workforce so that domestic chores have to be increasingly shared. But it doesn’t mean that men have finally conquered this task with aplomb. Male grocery store phobia is as real and widespread as it has ever been.

Watch men next time you’re doing your shopping. I wouldn’t quite call it that little-boy-lost look that’s on their faces since they have become increasingly acquainted with grocery stores with the evolution of gender roles. It’s more the existential crisis look: the Why-did-I-have-to-be-born-just-to-do-this-s*** look because, really, do they care about which detergent gives you more frothy bubbles to annihilate germs off of garments? Do they care whether the fabric softener smells like pine or lemon? They’re so used to living with the smell of soiled gym socks they don’t need other scents to confuse them. Do they care if tomatoes on the vine are on special? Tomatoes are tomatoes and you need to pluck them off of the vine to eat them anyway so what’s with the deal with the creepy crawly green things? If it was steak selling on a buy-one-take-one promo, it’s a different story. Time stops and they’re stocking up on steak with a quick a drive-by along the barbeque sauce aisle and a pit stop at the charcoal section.

Notice how inefficient they are at grocery shopping: they don’t pick up all their needs by category. It doesn’t matter that they’re already at the dairy section — if eggs and butter don’t come immediately after milk on the list, they’re off to another aisle in search of the next item.  Grocery shopping for them is more like the Amazing Race: a kind of frenzied, purpose-driven task. Men don’t browse. They don’t get attracted to new merchandise or sale items. That’s what they consider getting sidetracked.   Men have tunnel vision: they don’t survey the aisle. They home in on a specific product ignoring the rest of the merchandise. They give more thought to the convenience of the task than the price. I must admit, they’re great at picking up stuff they’ve bought before; it’s the new items they have trouble with. It freaks them out.

Have you ever seen an urban professional, progressive man at the cereal aisle? That’s a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. If what is written on his list simply says “cereal,” he’s done for — it’s death by cereal — because he will want to please the kids and the wife at the same time and with the 40,000 choices staring right back at him, he’s already contemplating: cremation or embalmment?

It’s funny because if you take this same urban professional, progressive male to the Gatorade aisle he’ll know exactly which bottle to reach for and how many of them will last him until his next shopping trip.

They never ask for help — no surprises there. If they can’t find the exact item on the list they simply decide they don’t need it. They’ll figure out some complicated Economies of Scale theoretical explanation for the wife later. They won’t pull the cart over to ask for help. They don’t talk to anybody. If the pimply bag boy or a kind little old lady senses their helplessness and offers assistance they decline with a self-assured, “I’m good here, couldn’t be better.” If they must, they only talk to the butcher because his bloodstained apron and his gimormous cleaver make him an okay resource person — he’s a bro. 

Now you know why men who accompany their wives grocery shopping are transformed into the meekest of creatures, content to maneuver that heavy cart along the aisles, mute and opinion-less, acquiescing to her every choice of item — they are secretly terrified of grocery stores and wouldn’t want to be caught in there alone.

Last weekend I was shopping at S&R, the wholesale warehouse store at The Fort. I noticed this couple along the sweets aisle. The wife was in your typical suburban housewife grocery-shopping outfit: loose floral dress and flip-flops with her hair pinned back with a banana clip. The husband, the same: T-shirt, cargo shorts, flip-flops. 

The wife’s ascendancy over the husband was apparent from far away. He was slumped over the handle of the cart, resting his chin on his forearm, cruising at the slowest of speeds, trailing the wife as she intently gathered items off the shelves, and careful to relieve her of them and unload them into the cart.

Curious, I followed them for a while, observing closely from a distance. They hardly had any conversation.  What little there was of it was a plea on the husband’s part for the wife’s permission to let him pick up a snack or two of his choice. It went like this:

Attempt number 1: Husband picking up an individual pack of chocolate-filled Oreo cookies: “Hey, this looks good.  I’ve never tried Oreos with chocolate inside. Let’s get this.” He proceeds to drop it in the cart — not so fast!

Wife tossing the pack of Oreo out of the cart: “That’s chocolate overload. It’s not good for the kids.”

Husband acquiesces.

 Attempt number 2: Husband picking up a pack of assorted bite-sized Hershey’s chocolates: “Smart people. Look at this, they have a little of everything in it: Butterfinger, Milky Way, Hershey’s bar — something for everybody.” He drops it stealthily into the cart. 

Wife fishes it out of the cart and says: “No.”

Husband bites his tongue and slumps lower onto the cart handle.

Attempt number 3 at the canned goods aisle: Husband gets excited reading the label of a giant Campbell’s clam chowder soup can: “Can we have this? I’ve never seen Campbell’s soup this big. It should be enough for the five of us.” Into the cart it went — for one or two seconds.

Wife grabs it and puts it back on the shelf saying: “Too much sodium and preservatives.”

There it was, rejection after rejection. The husband did get one lucky break, though: she let him have his choice of the grooved toothpicks that came in their own yellow-capped dispenser instead of the plain ones with no dispenser.

After witnessing his little victory, I turned about and went on my way. But that wasn’t the last I saw of them. We met again at the checkout counters so I pulled along right behind them just to see how their day at the grocery store would end.

Husband unloaded all the merchandise on the conveyor belt while the wife kept busy texting on her BlackBerry.  Come time to pay up, it was the husband who whipped out the credit card and signed for the bill.

I was surprised. With all the vetoing she did over his choice of grocery items, I presumed she had a household budget to work with and wasn’t willing to stretch it to accommodate his impulse purchases.

I’ll let you in on a secret, guys: we know how terrified you are of being alone in grocery stores. We know you need us to hold your hand through those aisles and pick up merchandise brands that we have come to be loyal to and couldn’t function without. We have budgets to work with along with the noble intention of keeping up healthy nutrition standards in the home. If the wife is paying for the groceries from the household fund, be the mute shopping cart driver and keep that smile on your face. 

But if you’re picking up the tab, over and above ditching your golf game just to clock in some family time, you are so entitled to put anything your heart desires into that shopping cart. Man up and pile it on.

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Thank you for your letters. You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com.