Shopping

Shopping is considered as one of the main activities of women in the contemporary western world: nearly one tenth of daily activity is done by US women, according to researchers .

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Shopping lists are known to have been used by Romans, as one was discovered near Hadrian's wall dated around 100 AD written for a soldier.

Zhu Houzhao, who was Ming Dynasty Emperor in China from 1505 to 1521, had a fake shopping market built outside his palace so he could pretend to shop like the commoners did. It was staffed by his servants who he made dress up like merchants and commoners.

The first shopping bag with handles was invented in 1918 by St. Paul, Minnesota grocer Walter Deubener. The package consisted of a paper bag with string reinforcing the bottom and running up the sides through holes and over the top to create handles.

The inventor of the shopping cart, Sylvan Goldman, had to pay people to push them around her small supermarket in Oklahoma City for two years before people would use them.

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The home shopping/electronic retailing industry was created in 1977, when small market talk radio show host Bob Circosta was asked to sell green-colored can openers live on the air by station owner Bud Paxson. When all 112 can openers sold out within the hour. Paxson sensed the vast sales potential of home-based commerce, and founded the world's first shopping channel on cable television, later launching nationwide with the Home Shopping Network.

Jane Snowball was the first person to ever shop online. In May 1984, she used a modified television connected to a telephone line to order groceries from her local Tesco supermarket in Gateshead, England. The system was called Videotex, and it used a technology called Teletext. Teletext allowed users to access information and services on their televisions by pressing buttons on the remote control.

The Videotex system was developed by Michael Aldrich, who is considered the father of online shopping. Aldrich was inspired to create the system after seeing how difficult it was for elderly people to get to the shops. He believed that Videotex could make it easier for people to shop from home.

Britain's first shopping channel, QVC begins its transmission on BskyB in 1993.

The Amazon.com online shop was launched in July 1995 by Jeff Bezos, originally selling only books. The electronic commerce company has since extended to selling CDs, DVDs, video games, computer software, electronic items, clothes, furniture and food.

In Britain, Tescos became the first supermarket in 1996 to offer Internet shopping and within a few years, housewives all over the world could buy groceries without ever leaving the house.

Author Lee Child was inspired to name his character Jack Reacher after a shopping trip. An old lady asked for his help in reaching for a can of pears; Child's wife, when seeing this, commented that if his writing career didn't work out, he could "always get a job as a reacher."

"Retail Therapy" refers to shopping as a way of lifting your mood when stressed or anxious. It is an ironic term that satirizes the shallowness of modern consumer society. Though shopping hardly qualifies as true therapy in the medical or psychotherapeutic sense, if pressed, there are those who would admit to being psychologically lifted by a particular purchase. The first recorded use of the term was in the Chicago Tribune dated December 24, 1986: "We've become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy."

Back in 2018, Ariana Grande was feeling depressed following her split from comedian Pete Davidson. She decided to take a trip to Tiffany's for some retail therapy, accompanied by six friends. There, she bought them all matching rings, and later wrote the hit song "7 Rings" about the experience.

Jack Reacher's name derives from a day when author Lee Child, a tall man himself, was asked to reach groceries from a high shelf for a fellow shopper.

A study shows that the average male gets bored on shopping trip after just 26 minutes while average woman tires after around two hours.

People do their shopping online more on Mondays than they do any other day of the week.

In Australia, New Zealand, Canada and UK, Boxing Day is the heaviest shopping day of the year.

Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving and the most profitable shopping day of the year in the US, got its name from the old accounting practice of using red ink for debt and black ink for profit.

Cyber Monday is the busiest shopping day in the U.S. and U.K. Sales will peak around 11:25 am, at which time Amazon will sell more than 320 products per second.

Norwegians pay half-tax in November so that they have more money for Christmas shopping.

Breakfast cereal packets are placed on shelves at the eye height for a reason. Researchers have found consumers are 16% more likely to trust a brand of cereal when the characters on the boxes on the supermarket shelves look them straight in the eye.