Quote from: Foxglove on August 19, 2014, 03:12:00 AM
I'm sorry you didn't. You'd have been in a position to verify something for me--or perhaps not.
One thing I noticed about women when they're shopping: they are very focussed, focussed exclusively on what they're looking at or looking for. They pay no attention to the other shoppers around them. Which is why a guy can just jump right in with no worry because nobody will notice him.
One time I was looking at some cosmetics on a display and the woman standing next to me moved over and bumped into me and didn't even seem to notice that she had. She went on looking at whatever she was looking at on the display. Now that's focus.
And one time I was in Penney's and found some shoes I wanted and really wanted to try them on. Very busy Saturday, the place was packed. So I just sat down and very casually tried them on. I knew nobody would be paying any attention to me. And a quick glance around confirmed that for me.
My experience has been that women shoppers are like sharks: they're only looking at their prey and they don't let anything distract them. I wonder if anybody else would agree or disagree with this.
Yeah, my experiences shopping in guy-mode were always positive. But as Laura just mentioned, some people will have negative experiences. Now I believe that such negative experiences are fairly rare, but if other people jump in and start giving me lots of negative stories, then maybe I'll have to change my mind on that.
In my experience, most women aren't paying much attention to the people around them when you're shopping in a large store, but I have certainly seen some women cast lingering glances on people in those same stores. Some women will evaluate people around them and/or what is being purchased, and if they see you and suspect something is up, they might glance at you a few times. I have had this happen to me in Kohl's, Target, and in an H & M.
I have had some negative shopping experiences. Sometimes, this comes from employees paying too much attention to you in a place where they normally don't pay much attention to customers. In the same Kohl's, where the employees rarely come up to customers to ask them if they need anything, I once saw a shop attendant staring at me while I browsed. I moved away, worried I had been read but trying to play it off. A minute or two passed, and then she came to me and asked if I was finding everything all right. She was staring at me in a puzzled way. I said "mmhmm" in as neutral a way as I could, but my voice is deep and I'm sure I confirmed her suspicions. I continued to shop, then went into the women's dressing room (the one on the women's side, though the rooms are technically all unisex, I think) to try some things on. No one else was in the stalls, as far as I could tell. The same shop attendant followed me into the dressing room, paused outside my door as I changed, and then knocked on my door and asked if I was all right. I answered her, she said "oh," and left. When I went to pay, she looked at me as I walked to the cashier. The cashier I had was sweet, but that other employee gave me such a weird vibe. I felt like I was being watched, like she thought I was in the wrong place.
Most of my experiences have been neutral to positive so far, but some employees either just don't understand us/haven't received training or don't want us around (like that infamous former employee in Macy's who told a transwoman she couldn't enter a woman's dressing room).
