Trolley-Pushing – A man’s world?

When I go to my supermarket of choice in Maseru I find that there is often someone to help me pack. It tends to be a lady who assists me. However, on the occasions that I have a trolley, something interesting happens. The female gets very quickly displaced by a man.

The sequencing goes something like: a female is packing at any given tillà Someone with a trolley joins the queueà Watch closely and at some point between the trolley joining the queue and arriving at the checkout, the female is replaced by a maleà The trolley is unpacked and on the other side of the till the man then packs everything up into a new trolley.

Sometimes, quite extraordinarily, I can be carrying a well-stocked basket and, if it is well enough stocked, a man will arrive to help me pack, and with amazing talent, will manage to use enough plastic bags and careful packing to fill an entire trolley!

I find this an interesting phenomenon; I can think of no reason, a priori, why it should require a man rather than a woman to help me pack a trolley (ignoring entirely the question of whether I really need any help at all). Some light can be shed when we add tipping into the equation.

It seems that not many people tip those who just help you pack your bags, or if they do, it is very little. If you have a trolley on the other hand, the person (always, always a man) will insist that he roll the trolley down to your car, whilst you walk helplessly alongside him. You will then thank him very much for his very hard work and (if you are me) make a sarcastic remark about how you don’t know how you would have managed without his help or how weak you are feeling today and how grateful you are. Crucially, you will then tip him.

So any job (in the supermarket) that attracts significant tipping is done by men. Why? On a superficial level, it could be argued that men are stronger than women so that heavier work should be done by men. This might be true, but the strength required to pack a trolley and push it to a car would exclude no more females than males, and, I suspect, any comparative advantage argument is unlikely to hold too strongly.

Despite this, the traditional role of men doing the harder physical work might well be used to justify this even though it is stretched close to breaking point (but apparently without breaking). This, I assume, would then be an excuse rather than the explanation.

I am not sure exactly where the real explanation does lie however. It might be linked to this excuse, in that men are fighting hard to maintain their traditional gender roles – even if only superficially. Alternatively it might be more linked to tips.

Men might simply be using their physical advantage over women to ensure they earn the tips at women’s expense. This might be for the sake of the money in general, or it might be in order to maintain their gender role as household income earner within their own households.

I am still confused as to why the women let this happen? Next time, I might try to insist that a female pack my trolley and see what happens. Any suggestions?