Your partner walks through the door with a bag full of snacks, a premium steak nobody asked for, and absolutely no bread. Nothing you can actually build a meal from. If this scene feels painfully familiar, you're not alone — and now there's real research to back you up.
What the study actually found
The National Bureau of Economic Research recently published a study that set out to examine how working from home changes shopping habits. The premise was straightforward: people who work remotely shop at different times and in different patterns. Expected. What wasn't expected was what the data showed when broken down by gender.
On average, households where someone shifted to remote work spent about 10% more on groceries. But when researchers looked at where that increase was coming from, the picture got interesting. The spending spike was three to five times larger in households where the man took over shopping duties compared to those where the woman did. In other words, men were almost entirely responsible for driving that average up. Women's spending barely changed.
Men also made more trips to the store — but spent less time there. Which, as anyone who has unpacked one of those bags knows, usually means less thoughtful, less intentional shopping.
Why does this keep happening? The socialization nobody talks about
Kate Mangino, author of Equal Partners, argues this isn't about laziness or indifference. The roots go much deeper — all the way back to how boys and girls are raised.
From a young age, girls receive hundreds of small, often invisible signals that the household is their domain. Not through explicit lessons, but through who gets asked to set the table, who helps with cooking, who's told to notice when something runs out. These signals accumulate, and over time they don't just become knowledge — they become instinct.
Boys simply don't receive those signals. Nobody expects them to mentally track who eats what, which items are running low, which brand the family buys, or what's on sale this week. These are learned skills. And if you never learned them growing up, you won't suddenly have them as an adult.
Grocery shopping isn't just a physical task — that's the whole point
Mangino breaks household work into three distinct layers that we tend to blur together:
- Physical labor: Going to the store, carrying the bags home. This is visible, measurable — and men have genuinely taken on more of it in recent decades. That's real progress.
- Cognitive labor: Planning the meals, writing the list, tracking what's in the fridge, knowing what runs out fastest, watching for deals. Less visible, but it consumes enormous mental energy.
- Emotional labor: Knowing who likes what, who's allergic to what, what your partner won't eat, what fits the meals you've planned for the week. This is the hardest to hand off — and it almost always lives in one person's head.
Men have made real strides with the physical layer. But the cognitive and emotional layers? Those still belong, overwhelmingly, to women. And you can't fix that by writing a list — because writing the list is itself part of the mental load.
Why a shopping list isn't enough
The most common advice is: just write a list and it'll be fine. In practice, it usually isn't. Writing the list requires someone to mentally scan the entire household — what's left, what's needed, what's planned for the week. That work almost always falls to the person who's already tracking everything in their head.
And the list is never complete. There's always something "obvious" that goes unwritten — because one person knows it without thinking, and the other never had to. Bread, for example. Bread is always needed. It's not on the list because everyone knows. Except the person who's never been the one doing the shopping.
What you can actually do about it
The first and perhaps most important step: stop fixing it yourself. If you quietly go back to the store, rework the dinner plan, and say nothing, you're reinforcing the message that this is your job — and that when things go wrong, you'll be the one to sort it out.
Mangino's advice? Send them back. No bread? They go get it. Wrong pasta? They figure out what to make with it. This isn't punishment — it's how anyone learns anything: through consequences, not rescue.
What works even better long-term is an honest conversation about who carries what pressure around the household. Not as an argument, not as a list of grievances — but as a genuine exchange of information. Partners often don't realize how much mental energy goes into running a home, not because they don't care, but because nobody ever showed them it existed. When you name it out loud, something often starts to shift. Not overnight — but it starts.
And if nothing seems to change?
Sometimes the most useful thing is to let it go. If he brings the wrong pasta, dinner can still happen. If the coffee he bought is a bit pricier than usual but he's the one who went to the store, that trade-off might be worth it.
The goal isn't perfect grocery shopping. It's not even doing it exactly the way you would. The goal is making sure the cognitive and emotional weight of running a home doesn't sit entirely on one person's shoulders — because over time, that's not sustainable. Not for the relationship, and not for the person carrying it.
