- Pay attention, Caryl. - Good evening. Thank you for joining us for "A Feminist Perspective." I'm Caryl Smith, associate dean of women at the University of Kansas. This weekly radio broadcast is sponsored by the Women's Resource and Career Planning Center, a program and information service of the Dean of Women's Office in 220 Strong Hall. "A Feminist Perspective" provides a forum for women themselves to speak publicly on issues of concern to them and helps inform other women and men of the movement, which is making and remaking the shape and substance of women's and men's lives today. The Women's Resource and Career Planning Center contains large amounts of information, news clippings, government documents, magazine articles, research studies, and books pertaining to many aspects in the women's movement. We would like to invite you to come in and browse or take advantage of the materials which can be borrowed. That's 220 Strong Hall at the University of Kansas. Tonight on "A Feminist Perspective," we are starting a four-part series that will continue throughout November on women and economics. Tonight, our topic for discussion will be "Women as Consumers." Our guest presenter tonight will be Dr. Beverly Anderson from the University of Kansas. She is assistant professor of marketing at the School of Business. Good evening, Beverly, and welcome. - Well, thank you, it's nice to be here. - Now, you've been at the University of Kansas for a few years now? - Three years, this is starting my fourth year. - Oh, marvelous. Can you tell us a little more about yourself? - Well, I'm married and I have one son who's nine years old, and I'm interested in doing research on women. It originally started as women as consumers. but now I've sorta gotten away from that and gotten into an awful lot of research on the careers women tend to choose, and attitudes of college women towards different careers, and why they tend to choose the majors they do, and what they hope to do with their lives. - You have some of that coming out in a soon to be published form, don't you? - Yes, we hope that a soon to be published book, called "Women in the Labor Market," and I must get a plug in for my coauthor, who is Tony Redwood who is also in the School of Business because one time he didn't get his name in on it, and I wanna make sure that his name gets on it. - When can we expect to see this? - Well, hopefully, the spring of next year. - Well, marvelous, please let us know and we'll have you back at that time. - Oh, okay. - So we'll talk about it, and bring Tony, too. - Yes, oh, very definitely. - It will be wonderful. Also with us tonight as commentator, we have Ms. Linda Jones from the Dean of Women's Office. Hello, Linda, welcome back. - Thank you. - Would you tell us something about yourself and what you do at the Dean of Women's Office? - Well, this is my second year at the University of Kansas, and in the Dean of Women's Office, I work with various student groups, including the Panhellenic Association, Queens, and advise a commission committee, commission on the status of women's committee on beyond high school. And like all the other staff members, I work with any and all concerns of interest to women. - Well, thank you very much, and thanks for joining us tonight. Bev, we've all heard you speak a number of times. We really wanted to have an opportunity for you to share with the radio audience on "A Feminist Perspective" some of the things that you've learned as you've been concerned about women as consumers in the past several years. - Well, I'm really glad for this opportunity, because many women in the Lawrence area were in my survey that I originally started off doing with this, trying to discern if there was any difference in shopping behaviors of working women versus non-working women. And I wrote a couple of papers on that, which were working women versus non-working women, a comparison of shopping behaviors. So if anyone listening was part of that survey, I'm sure they'd like to know whether they were in the majority or the minority. - I'm sure. - We gathered quite a bit of information on them, and one of the things I was concerned with if they tended to have different behavior. And we did find very definitely in many instances, a working woman, whether she is married or whether she is single, tends to have different shopping behavior patterns than does a non-working woman, whether she be single or whether she be married. And I was specifically concerned about grocery shopping. And the reason it was grocery shopping is practically everybody does grocery shopping, not only males and females, but regardless of your marital status, you tend to do grocery shopping. You have to eat. And so one of the things we were very curious about is what were their attitudes towards grocery shopping and how many times a week they went to the grocery store. And it was very interesting to find, as was to be expected, that the working woman tended to go fewer times a week to the grocery store than did the non-working woman. As a matter of fact, the working woman tended to go on the average of once a week and maybe even only once every two weeks, whereas the non-working woman went about two to three times a week. - Oh, my heavens, is that right? - Yes, she went quite frequently. And of course, the size of the grocery bill was of course correspondingly larger for the working woman because she tended to go fewer times. So each time she went, she spent more in the grocery store. And another interesting thing we found was that they tended to shop particularly at one store, rather than shopping around at different grocery stores in the Lawrence area. - They who? - The working women, working women tended to do this. If they went to one grocery store, whether it be Rusty's or Falley's, or I don't wanna give any particular plugs, Kroger's, anyone, they happened to- - Stop. - Did I do something wrong? - Mm-mm. - I broke a tape. I knew it. - Hi. - They'd always go to that one store, whereas the non-working woman tended to shop around at several stores in the area. And I don't know if it was because she was looking for bargains or what, but we did find the working woman tended to be very store loyal. And talking about being loyal, we also found that the working woman tended to be very much more brand loyal than did the non-working woman. Now, what we mean by brand loyal is that you start buying one brand of a product and continue to buy that brand. You don't switch around to other brands. And all of this started accumulating together, and what we came to the conclusion was that the working woman did everything she could to conserve time when she was going grocery shopping. And we find that being store loyal is very time saving because you know where everything is in the store. You don't have to look around. You know where the produce is. You know where the canned goods are. And you get a shopping pattern in the store and you follow that and you know where everything is. And as far as being brand loyal, this also conserves time, because when you look at an array of several, let's say 15 or 20 brands of a product, you don't have to stand and look at all of them and think, "Gee, which one is the best buy this week? Which one's the lowest price? Which one will I try?" You can just automatically go towards the brand that you have always bought and it's much less time consuming. - What does this say about the advertising though, in terms especially thinking about the weekly advertising, such as the special sections that particularly the grocery stores put out? Are the working women then perhaps not shopping well in some cases because they do not take advantage necessarily? - Now, shopping well, I will tend to say, we find they value their time more than they value their money. Now, I'm not saying that's not shopping well, because I happen to be a working woman with a family, and I agree, I value my time very much. And if I miss two cents on a special deal, well, it would probably cost me more than that in time. And so when you say not shop well, I think we have to be careful when we say, what are the values? - Well, that's true, I certainly think they change. For instance, at one point I did not work for two years, and I certainly did shop differently. I'm very interested to see that I fell well within the norm that you've established. And I also fall well within the norm now that I've been working for a number of years. - But we found on an interesting thing when we talk about the saving time is I had expected, as everyone had expected, that working women would be greater users of convenience food items than would the non-working woman. My research did not support this at all. As a matter of fact, we found that the non-working woman was just as likely to use convenience food items as was the working woman. And this sort of surprised us in the beginning, but what we more or less concluded is the working woman is more concerned about the time she spends outside the home, and not as concerned, no more concerned, about the time she spends inside the home than is the non-working woman. In other words, food preparation times, once the working wife or mother is home, it really doesn't make much difference as far as the time she spends cooking. She still feels that's time with her family. Whereas she's very concerned about the time she spends away from home because she's away from home probably eight hours a day or some semblance of that. And then when she has to grocery shop on top of that, and we do find that a grocery shopping trip usually takes about 40 minutes when you include transportation and the time in the store. If you add that onto an eight-hour day, that really takes a lot of time. So she tries to conserve there, but not so much inside the home, as far as convenience food items. - Did any part of this study differentiate between the working woman who was and was not married? I would think that might make a difference. - Some parts of it did. Now, the brand loyalty, it didn't seem to tend to, there was no difference. And as far as store loyalty, it didn't tend to. Now there was a difference on the number of grocery shopping trips per week. The single woman tends to make more per week than does the married woman. And this is probably because they tend to buy in smaller quantities and don't stock up as much. - Well, I find being a single working woman that it's more difficult to cook for one person, no matter if you're using convenience food items or if you're trying to cook, quote, from scratch, because in terms of you buy a frozen casserole or something and it serves two. Well, it really doesn't do very well if you refreeze it. - That's right. - Or if you buy a package of meat, you have to remember to take out the separate pieces of the chicken or to divide up the ground beef. Otherwise, you're ending up with one or two pounds of ground meat that you can't possibly eat in one setting. - And you really don't always entertain just to use up your food. - Not always. - We also asked a question on our survey in the research that I asked the women whether they felt themselves to be liberated or not, which was sort of an interesting thing. And I did not define liberated. I let them define whatever, if they felt they were, if they felt they weren't. And it was sort of interesting is that a liberated woman varied from a married woman who had never worked with four or five children at home to a single career woman. In other words, you couldn't break them down onto their marital status, whether they worked or not, or whether they had children or not, as to whether they considered themselves liberated. But I thought, well, this might indicate something. So we did some cross-tabulations on whether or not the women who did consider themselves to be liberated behaved any differently than the women who did not consider themselves to be liberated. And on behavior, we didn't find any differences at all, but on attitudes towards grocery shopping, we certainly did. And that was where we found that the women who did not consider themselves to be liberated considered grocery shopping an enjoyable social occasion, something they enjoy doing. The liberated woman said, "It's a necessary but unpleasant type task that I have to do. My attitude towards it is pretty negative, but it's something I'd rather do without if I didn't have to." And I thought this was sort of interesting that it had no relationship with whether they worked or not, but it very definitely did in their sort of self-concept of whether they felt themselves to be liberated or not, which was just sort of interesting. - Well, that is, and yet at the same time, I'm afraid that I confess, I wouldn't necessarily want to be introduced to the governor or someone as I sometimes appear in the grocery store when I go late at night or on Sundays, as I did last night. But at the same time, I certainly remember from the years when I did not work that some of my neighbors, and it may be I but I don't remember it, indeed almost dressed up. It was an occasion. And that certainly goes along with what you've indicated. I don't know that I ever thought of it that way, but maybe it's much more than I anticipated. - I think there would be another thing with that too, in terms of during the day, the women who are not working know that they will be in the grocery store with other women who are not working, and therefore they will see their friends and perhaps with their small children. Whereas the working women who either have to shop after five or face the horrible Saturday crowds, have other things. - Yes, I agree. - And just don't see it as quite the same light. - As a matter of fact, you were talking about a social occasion. There was some research done in France several years ago when they tried to get supermarkets first introduced into France, and they found they were a total disaster. And the main reason was that women did consider, the French women, did consider it social. And they went to the marketplace and they met all their friends, and this is where they got all the gossip. This gave them an opportunity to get away from their children and to talk with other adults, which they didn't have too much. And they didn't wanna buy in large quantities. They wanted that social interaction every day. And with some people, if you are at home all day, this does provide an outlet for social interaction. - That's very interesting. Oh heavens, I wouldn't presume to think that we're offering this is the primary social hour for any of these people. - No. - But it certainly might well take on a different aspect of a woman's life. In any of your research, did you touch on whether the working woman who is married or the single woman who is working and lives with a friend, do these people share the responsibility for grocery shopping? Do they prefer to go with their husband or roommate? - Working women who are married tend to go with their husbands much, much more than do women who are married and not working, without question. As a matter of fact, it's a shared responsibility in most instances that the husband and wife do go together. And that's why we can see other statistics have shown that 30% of the grocery store shoppers today are men, and some of them are with the women. Although we did find, and I hadn't sort of planned on this, that some women actually do not even do their own grocery shopping. That is the husband's responsibility. These were working women and where both of them worked, that that was just one of the duties. The wife may do the cooking, but the grocery shopping was the responsibility of the husband. And so therefore, those questionnaires, I didn't exactly know what to do with since they didn't do the grocery shopping. But on whether or not they lived with roommates, I didn't get that information, so I didn't know if they went. But I asked, did they normally go with friends? And friends, very seldom, did people go with friends, married or single. Normally, they went with their family if they went with anyone. - Now, if they go with children, I think that some other studies have found that has a different influence on their bill. - Without question, it increases by the number of children you take. And fortunately, I only have one child to take, so it only increases by an X amount. - I bet it also increases the kinds of cereal you have at home, too. - Yes, too much. - Out of this whole thing, I suspect that you have evolved some perhaps words to the wise in terms of how people might better utilize their time spent in the grocery stores or any store. - No, I don't have any monumental words of wisdom, because my research just sort of concluded that if a woman works, she tends to value the time more highly than does the non-working woman. And I think what this says is that she values her time more than her money, and a few cents difference just don't make that much difference. And I'm not saying, I'm not trying to pass judgment, I don't think this is wrong. When you have a limited amount of time, a limited resource is always the most valuable. - I think that somewhere recently I was reading that the consumer and consumer agency was urging men and women both to very carefully plan when they went to a grocery store, because after all the grocery store chains in particular and private groceries not to be excluded certainly plan for selling their products. - Oh, they do. - And some products, they indeed advertise as loss leaders and other things are at more standard price increments for them, and so that people can very much be affected by how things are displayed in the store and how one particular item may be really promoted in one week or a series of weeks, free things that are given, either free or very reduced cost, the dishes, the silver, whatever. And I don't know how this affects marketing in general, but consumer agencies certainly say be very cautious. - Yeah, like we have found that some people tend to be deal prone people, as we call them, and some people are not. And this goes along with coupon saving, clipping out of the newspaper the special coupons and saving those that you get in the mail. Other people tend to toss them away. Some people tend to be very much influenced by point of purchase displays in the store. Other people do not. And we tend to say it's more of a personality type, deal proneness versus not deal proneness, in an individual, which has to do much more with the personality type. - Than their lifestyle. - That's right, than their lifestyle, whether they work or whether they don't. We also find that some people tend to be very great impulse shoppers, and you might be interested to know that generally speaking males are more impulse prone than females are, just picking up things in the store. - I would believe that. - You talk about adding children and that you get a larger grocery bill. I have found adding my husband, I get a larger grocery bill. It's just something catches my husband's eye as he goes along. - The gourmet food section. - That's right, always the unique ones. And we find that some people tend to be very much influenced or as we call them impulse purchasers. In other words, they don't plan to buy it when they go into the grocery store, but they come out with it. They plan to buy probably $5 worth of goods. Maybe I'd better raise that to 10 with inflation. And they come out with 15 or 20. Now that is an impulse purchaser who doesn't have a very well-thought out plan of what they're going to buy and are influenced by in-store plans. But they have done research on women. A colleague of mine at Ohio State had done and found that you can't really say a lot of women in grocery stores are impulse shoppers, because many women go in there with a general idea of, "I have four meals I have to buy for." And if you ask them ahead of time, they can't tell you what they're going to have for those meals, but they know that they're going to have to buy for four meals. Now, if there is a special on fish, so they'll buy a fish. If there's a special on something else, they'll buy something else, but they don't make up their menu until they go into the store. And then things in the store can influence them. But still if they only come out with things for four meals, you can't say they were really impulse purchasers. - It rather sounds clever. - That's right, that's right. How many meals do you have to buy for? And then you wait and what looks good to you when you're in the store. Does this meat really look good? - There must have been some things done about people's bills escalating in terms of time of day when they shop. - Oh, before meals! Before meals, never go to the grocery store before a meal. Always go after you've eaten and you can cut your grocery bill by about 10 or 20%. - Oh, I'll go with that. It happens to me all the time. - Now, Linda, you've worked in retail stores. How would you judge that women behave in terms of their shopping? Do you feel that they're just as impulsive in general retail stores, particularly clothing? - Well, I've worked in clothing and that area of merchandising, and it certainly is a very different thing, the different types of women and the patterns you see. If a woman comes in with her boyfriend or husband, she'll try on 25 things and buy as many as he says he likes and will pay for. If she's by herself, I have seen, and this is not scientific research, she will come in looking for a blouse to go with three different outfits. They tend to be a whole lot more frugal, unless it's a special outfit for a special occasion, and then she may spend twice what she would normally spend. But there are certain differences in the kinds of ways that women do shop. - I agree with that, very definitely. There was some research done by the American Advertising Association and they were interested in clothing behavior of working women versus non-working women. And they did a study and they found working women have more pantsuits in their wardrobe than non-working women. Just thought I'd throw that out. And they also found that working women tended to do most of their clothing shopping either on their lunch hour or right after work. So therefore, it was more important that a retail outlet be close to places of business where women were employed than near their homes, because most of their clothing shopping was done around the time when they worked and preferred to go to stores near where they worked, not near where they lived. - Well, in that way, it cut into their day less. - That's right, the time. - Back to some of the same concepts that you're talking about with the groceries. - There's one other area that I'd like to at least touch on because it's been something which has been a concern to me. And that is women as a consumer being taken seriously. In terms of when I've made major purchases, such as an automobile or more recently, I went in the store trying to buy new tires for my car, snow tires and new tires. I was with a man and I asked the questions. It was my car, not his, and the salesman spoke directly to him and asked him all the questions. - Well, I would have walked out. As a matter of fact, I told the dealer where I bought my automobile that I bought my automobile there because he never asked me what my husband did or how much my husband made since I was buying the automobile and it was my car. That really impressed me. And I think that women are going to have to start walking out of stores or doing something like that and showing they're displeased. - I agree. - I think that they must also make it known when they are displeased in a particular establishment. - Yes, that's right. Yes, you're going to have a session on credit. - Yes, next week. - But I think this is one of the areas where they say, "Well, you can't get credit. What is your husband's name and what does he do? - Right, and then, when in my case or in other single women's cases, I don't have a husband, no, it's for me. I had one car salesman say, "I just don't believe you." And at that point, I did exactly as you said." I explained to him I was in fact serious and I was going to buy this kind of a car elsewhere. - I think this is something I'm sure that we'll get into in some detail next week, but I think it's important to say now, and that is not only must women take themselves seriously as consumers- - That's right. - In order to expect others to do so, but really women of all ages and sizes and lifestyles must begin to really assert themselves and try to establish themselves as consumers, and that means also to establish themselves with financial credit. - That's right. - You have anything that you can say to reinforce that, I can't say it strongly enough. - I can't say it strong enough either. I think this is one of the things and I think one of the most important things is that you have to tell the stores, the retail stores or whoever you're dealing with, that you are displeased and not just go along with it and be unhappy, and sort of have what we call overt behavior. In other words, there's no visual display of displeasure. - You walk out and you're mad in your own car. - That's right. - And it doesn't do them any good. - But it doesn't do them any good because I think there are a lot of firms that really aren't aware that this type of thing I say bugs us, because it really bugs me. - Is there anything you can say to someone who feels she's been discriminated against in a retail establishment of any kind? She should ask to see the manager? - Yes, I definitely do. - What else should she do to show as a consumer? - Anyone higher up who she feels will have an impact with, she should register her displeasure that she wasn't taken seriously, that she planned to buy something, that for some reason or another, they didn't consider her a credible or a possible customer. And I think that women are just going to, if they wanna be taken seriously as consumers, which I hope most of us do since we spend most of the money in the United States today, we are the most viable source of consumer monies in the world. And it seems to me that we have our hands on the purse strings and we have to use it wisely. We have to be taken seriously. - Well, thank you very much for joining us tonight, Dr. Beverly Anderson and Linda Jones. We are embarked on a month-long series about women in economics, tonight dealing with women as consumers. And next week on November 12th, the program will be entitled "Women and Credit." On November 19th, the title of our program will be "Women and Social Security." And on November 26th, the program will be entitled "Women and Insurance." So you see that we're gonna try and get to some of this through the rest of the month. - Stay tuned. - Yes, definitely. - I've been asked to read an announcement, which in essence is a news release given to us by the Office of Affirmative Action at the University of Kansas. On Monday, November 12th, the Affirmative Action Advisory Unit for Women Graduate Students will hold its first meeting in the Kansas Union Parlor C at 7:30 p.m. All interested graduate students are encouraged to attend and join the unit. The purpose of the advisory unit as stated in the official University Affirmative Action Plan is to discuss concerns and interests which should be reflected in the Affirmative Action Program. The advisory unit will work closely with the Affirmative Action Office to channel students' concerns to the appropriate university bodies. Members will determine structure and priorities for the advisory unit. Anyone interested in joining the unit who is unable to attend the November 12th meeting should put his or her name and address on the mailing list at the Affirmative Action Office, 235 Strong Hall, 864-3686. An advisory unit for undergraduates will be formed in December of 1973. We thank you for listening and good evening. This has been "A Feminist Perspective." ... reflected in the Affirmative Action Program. The advisory unit.