Incompetent but generous: That's a man for you!

Incompetent but generous: That's a man for you! In a survey commissioned by Lenox, 68 percent of women said they're better gift-givers than the men in their lives. A smaller majority of men (55 percent) conceded that women are better at gift-giving. And yet, the survey also found that men are 70 percent more likely than women to spend $30 or more on a gift for a friend. In short, men are just the way marketers want them to be: insecure and, hence, willing to spend. Meanwhile, the survey also documented a lamentable amount of gift non-giving. Forty percent of people invited to a wedding said they don't always send a gift if they can't attend; just 28 percent always bring a gift for the host/hostess when visiting someone's home. When's the most important time of the year for receiving a gift? Nearly 40 percent said it's their birthday. Those folks might be pleased to see the results of another study of gift-giving behavior, by Unity Marketing. It found that people spend 53 percent of their annual "gifting budget" on various gift holidays, with Christmas and Mother's Day the top two. (Valentine's Day comes in at No. 3, so get on the stick!) The remaining 47 percent of their gift budget is spent for "gift occasions," with birthdays the foremost among these. The typical gifter gives birthday presents to 7.3 people per year, says the Unity Marketing report, shelling out an average of $349 in the process.Will people abandon their cheapskate ways as the economy picks up? Doubtful. The tendency to hunt for bargains—even while splurging in some favored categories—seems too deeply ingrained. One sign of this phenomenon is the way it has spread to the fashion category, particularly among younger women. A report from Vertis says 34 percent of Gen X women most often go to discount stores for their fashion purchases—up from 25 percent in 2002. Among adult women in general, the figure rose to 27 percent from 25 percent in 2002. The bargain-hunting habit has made significant inroads among upscale women: 15 percent of those with household income of $100,000-plus go most often to discount stores to buy fashion goods. If mere correlation were the same as cause-and-effect, we could theorize that health-club membership causes weight gain. After all, the rise in obesity has gained speed at a time when health-club membership has been rising. According to Mintel research, membership in health/fitness clubs reached 38 million last year—a 28 percent increase from five years earlier. Of course, there are plenty of health-club truants, with 10 percent of members saying they never go to the gym. Maybe it's masochism; maybe it's civic virtue. Whatever the motivation, a majority of New Hampshire TV viewers actually watched the commercials aired by the candidates in the week prior to the state's Democratic presidential primary. So they said, anyway, when polled on the matter by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey. In all, 85 percent of respondents said they saw campaign commercials during that period. Of that group, 68 percent said they watched the spots. Fifteen percent changed the channel when a political commercial came on, "although sometimes that just got them to a different campaign spot." Fourteen percent "turned away or just ignored" the spots, while 1 percent used a TiVo-like device to elude them. A breakdown of the data by age yields an intriguing tidbit: While senior citizens typically have above-average rates of voter turnout, they were the ones most likely to tune out the candidates' commercials: Among people who saw the spots, 58 percent of the 65-and-older cohort said they watched them, vs. 75 percent of the 18-29s, 66 percent of the 30-44s and 71 percent of the 45-64s. While consumer-confidence numbers are generally trending upwards, economic anxiety still abounds. In a Gallup poll fielded in the middle of January (and summarized in a Gallup Tuesday Briefing issued last week), 42 percent of adults said they expect the unemployment rate to increase during the next six months. Sixty-eight percent said it's a bad time now to find a "quality job." Americans are pretty half-hearted as cultural imperialists, to judge by a poll conducted for the Program on International Policy Attitudes by Knowledge Networks. Adults were asked how they feel when they hear of McDonald's opening new outlets around the world or about the popularity of American television shows in other countries. Fewer than half the respondents (46 percent) said it makes them feel good. Slightly more (48 percent) said they have "mixed feelings" when they hear such news; 5 percent said it gives them "bad feelings." (Of course, lots of Americans are similarly unenthused by the popularity of American TV shows in America and about the proliferation of McDonald's franchises here.) The same poll detected widespread public unease about the growth of international trade. One question asked the respondents to judge the overall impact of the increase in such trade, using a scale from 1 (completely negative) to 10 (completely positive). The mean answer was a tepid 5.31, down from 5.51 in a similar study fielded in 1999. When asked to assess the impact of international trade "on you personally," people were even less cheery, delivering a mean answer of 5.15—though that number is up a bit from the 5.05 recorded in the 1999 poll. In their cumulative answers, the respondents drew a sharp distinction between the effects of international trade on "American consumers" (mean answer: 6.08) and its effects on "American workers" (4.24). As the chart indicates, a majority of Americans believe the benefits of trade flow disproportionately to other countries. And among those who feel other countries benefit more than the U.S. does, 79 percent said this "bothers" them.

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Incompetent but generous: That's a man for you!

Mark Dolliver

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Mark Dolliver