I was going to the lumberyard to get two pieces of wood my husband K— and I needed to do some reframing, and K— said, “Better get ten.  No, make it a dozen.”   Why get a dozen if we only need two?  “To be sure we have enough—we’ll use them.”  I looked around our garage at the stacks of surplus building materials—plywood, drywall, fasteners, subflooring, concrete mix, insulation—all of which he’d bought with that same rationale (and all of which have been gathering dust for years) and wondered why it is that women have the reputation as compulsive shoppers!

I don’t deny that lots of women love to shop—may even live to shop.  I just take exception to the idea that men don’t.  Men adore shopping.  They’re just very selective about the things they like to shop for.  It’s easier to list the things they don’t like to buy: 1) anything for their wives; 2) household necessities; 3) gifts; 4) functional furniture; and 5) their own clothes.

Plus, for some reason men don’t like to buy just one of something.  Hence Costco, where you’re lucky if you can buy less than a dozen of anything.  My husband, Sir Spendalot, is a case in point.  When he set up his home office ten years ago, he bought so many stationery supplies we still haven’t used them up.  In a desperate attempt to reduce inventory, we’ve taken to handing out packets of paper clips and boxes of security envelopes as party favors, and this Halloween, we plan to give away stamp pads and #2 pencils along with bite-size Snickers bars.  Yet, one day when I brought home two boxes of cereal because they were on sale, he accused me of “hoarding.”

The male tendency to purchase stuff in startling quantities explains some of life’s little mysteries, such as why there are Army Surplus stores.  I used to wonder, “How can the Army have extra trousers?”  It’s not like they’ve disbanded or they’re reissuing the used ones or like soldiers these days are anatomically different than they used to be.  But now I understand.  Some fellow in Requisitions saw an order for 100,000 pairs of pants and said, “Oh, what the heck!  They’re cheaper by the half million.”  Voilà!  Some time later, 400,000 college students were wearing camouflage on campus.

I long since gave up on the notion that there’s any point in fighting male pattern shopping.  Instead of a futile campaign to mold men into leaner, meaner shopping machines, I take the opposite tack.  I simply want a piece of the action.  I want to establish a television shopping channel that would strive to accommodate the unique shopping style of men.  It would be a sort of guy’s counterpart to QVC* (because face it, QVC is for women).  It would be called CMQ, for “Consume Mass Quantities.”  There, a man could buy caulk by the case, liquor by the pallet, tube socks by the gross, salted peanuts by the metric ton, and lawn fertilizer by the railcar.  Absolutely nothing would be sold individually.  In addition, because guys find weird stuff more desirable, a very high proportion of the items featured on CMQ would be disposable, self-adhesive, loud, high-definition, made of Kevlar or just plain disgusting.  If I could find a product that was all of those things, I’d be retiring soon.

The host of CMQ would be (who else?) a resurrected Beldar Conehead, who would introduce viewers to the merchandise while simultaneously drinking an entire six-pack of beer and smoking an entire carton of cigarettes.  “Try this at home!” he’d yell while occasionally tossing handfuls of Sensor Rings at comely female aides who would squeal on cue.  A dozen Sensor Rings would come free with every order as a loss leader to get guys in the spending mood.

CMQ would be a phenomenal success.  The one problem with my plan is that K— might actually watch it, and that would be disastrous.  I’d come home to find a shipping container of glow-in-the-dark grout (“Saves on electricity!”) taking up half the front yard or a notice that my airplane cargo hold of edible headphones (“You’re jammin’ to Green Day at work, and the boss is coming!  Just eat the evidence!”) was being held for pickup at Customs.  But if CMQ did as well as I think it would, I could afford a whole fleet of Dumpsters to handle the overflow. Come to think of it, a Dumpster is one of those things K— is always trying to convince me we need, so maybe if I give him free rein to order Dumpsters as he sees fit, this is one problem that'll just take care of itself!

One thing that’ll never work, though, is a men’s shopping cooperative.  While women are perfectly happy to combine their purchasing power and then divvy up things like 50-lb. wheels of cheddar cheese to get a lower price, I don’t know any guy who’d be willing to share his chartered boatload of titanium tarpaulins.  “We’ll use them!” he’d say to his wife.

I was musing all this over while standing in the garage, when it occurred to me that since K— regularly overbuys, there might be some 2x4s around the house left over from a previous shopping trip.  I fished around and actually found a few sandwiched between a couple of bundles of roofing shingles a stack of extra concrete blocks.  I took them to K—, but made the mistake of telling him I’d found them in the basement.  He groused, “Oh, they’ve been around forever.”  I pointed out that 2x4s don’t have expiration dates, to which he sighed, “They’re probably all twisted.  I’d rather have new ones.”

I’m just thankful 2x4s don’t come in colors or flavors, or else K— would insist on getting the variety pack.  And that pretty much goes to the heart of the matter.  Guys, like crows, are uncontrollably drawn to glittery new stuff.  Need has nothing to do with it.  It’s all about the thrill of the purchase, and being the first one on the block with a dual-cam motorized garbage can (“Takes itself to the curb!”).

The good side of all this is that should I ever find myself wanting something really strange—something made of Teflon, say, or self-igniting, or maybe with a headlamp or built-in cleats—I know that I won’t have to do the comparison shopping myself.  All I’ll have to say to K— is, “Wouldn’t it be neat to have a laser-powered, sonar-equipped (fill in the blank with your choice of oddity)?” and he’ll be back to me within hours with seven different models and the hopeful query, “Why don’t we get a dozen?  You know we’ll use them.”

* For the sake of comparison, QVC stands for “Quality, Value, Convenience.”  This pretty much sums up the difference between men’s and women’s shopping priorities.