The trend emerged about 25 to 30 years ago, she says, and has slowly but steadily grown, along with the blurring of retail lines in general.
"Now you can buy everything everywhere," Brown says. "Places like World Market sell home items -- and food as well. At Williams-Sonoma you can buy food in addition to kitchen products."
And supermarkets go far beyond the basic food groups, selling flowers, prepared food, high-end kitchen items, with full-line pharmacies as well. They also indulge in special holiday spurts -- decorations and toys at Christmastime, egg-coloring kits and baskets at Easter, notebooks and pencil cases for back-to-school sales.
"People are time-conscious," Brown says. "You've got over 70 percent of women in the workforce."
So stores that sell a little bit of everything apparently are appealing to women who are too busy to shop -- and men who don't like to shop. One of my favorite statistics on the topic comes from Sears, which found that 37 percent of the men it surveyed would rather bake cookies than spend the afternoon shopping in a crowded mall. That figure dips to 27 percent in the Northeast but rises to 42 percent in the West. Was Arnold Schwarzenegger thinking cookies when he made his "girlie men" remark?
The Sears survey, in November, also reported that 89 percent of men would rather watch their favorite team lose to their worst rival than go shopping. Men said they put off shopping because they didn't know what to buy (79 percent), they didn't want to have to go to a couple of different stores (59 percent) and they were busy watching football (39 percent). If they could, they would buy everything at one store (89 percent). British men, apparently, suffer even more from shopping. A Lands' End United Kingdom survey found that 48 percent of men regard Christmas shopping as more stressful than losing a girlfriend or job.
And so they procrastinate. More than half of the men responding to a Blockbuster survey in the United States said they would be last in their families to finish their shopping; 32 percent of women said their husbands would be the family member finishing last.
Here's the good news for the sell-everything drugstores and supermarkets: More than half of all the Blockbuster respondents said that if they could shop at one place for all their gifts, they would.
Me, I'd rather shop than bake cookies. I'm happier weaving in and out of the silk scarf counters than the laxative department or the dog food aisle when I'm buying gifts. But I can procrastinate as much as the next person, which is why I am carefully guarding the drugstore coupon booklet now in my possession: handheld vacuum, $19.99; toaster oven/broiler, $14.99; fax machine, $29.99. (Expiration date, Dec. 24.)
"And," Jody Cook of Rite Aid reminds me, "we've never stopped selling the Whitman's Sampler."
