Valentine Shopping

February 11, 2004 - Men Shopping for Valentine’s Day

First it was a card - a little Valentine. “Be Mine!” it said. The people at Hallmark rejoiced. Then all of a sudden a card was not enough; there had to be flowers too - red roses to be specific, sold at twice the price as during the rest of the year. The people at FTD were smelling like roses. Then, flowers were not enough. Candy! Women love candy, lots of chocolates in big red heart shaped boxes. See’s? Yes Please! But chocolates are fleeting. Diamonds are forever. Big diamonds. The bigger, the better. DeBeers said cheers! How about dinner? Not, just any old dinner, but one of those packages where they give you a free bottle of cheap champagne, throw a rose on the table and charge you an extra hundred dollars! If you’re a man, isn’t she worth it? If you’re a woman, aren’t you worth it?

This is the first thing you see as you enter Victoria’s Secret at La Cumbre. No wonder men feel a little uneasy.

With so much to buy and so much to spend, no wonder all the men that the dedicated staff of edhat.com saw out Valentine’s Day shopping yesterday seemed so stressed and unhappy. We saw a young guy at See’s Candies shaking the boxes and fretting the line as he tried to choose between nuts and chews or assorted. We saw a middle age guy at Victoria’s Secret who was making so much noise standing still in line, that a special salesperson took him in the back to help. Ahh, it is so hard to choose between red and pink!

Why were we lurking at these stores you ask? We were counting the number of men and women at the two shops to determine the winner of our contest. What percentage of Valentine shoppers (at these very Valentine-y stores) would be men? But, as many of our subscribers wrote in, there wouldn’t be any more men than usual at the stores. Valentine’s Day is Saturday, and it is only Tuesday. Men do not plan ahead like that. They’d be waiting patiently by their televisions until the last possible minute. We should look on Friday night … after six … that’s when the men will be out, trying to find the perfect gift that expresses their truest sentiments.

So, aside from the few nervous men we mentioned, we mostly saw women. In all, 20% of the customers we saw at See’s were men, and 15% of the customers we saw at Vic’s Secret were men. The average guesses for our website contestants were 43%/30% about twice as high as the actual number. AdultEd was the winner with almost perfect guess of 20%/17%. AdultEd appropriately wins a See’s gift certificate and a Peet’s coffee card. Happy Valentine’s Day AdultEd!

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