I theorize women carrying a bag, and engaging in the environment-scanning behavior we call "shopping" may have originated in the hunter-gatherer period of human social development. Wikipedia quotes The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter-Gatherers as follows:
Hunting and gathering was humanity's first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Until 12,000 years ago, all humans lived this way.Early men were hunters and their women gatherers, for the most part. As gatherers, women needed a bag in which to tote home their gleanings - berries, fruits, nuts, gourds, grain, whatever. And they needed to be environmentally aware, scanning for ripe foodstuffs, other good stuff.
The children of women who toted a bag and were both talented and motivated at collecting food and other useful items were better fed, better clothed, and thus more likely to survive. We are their descendants; it's called "evolution."
Behavior that was highly functional for "90%" of human history may almost be "hard-wired" into us, close to instinctual. Men often like to hunt and fish, women often like to shop, and it may well have been that way for a hundred millennia.
