The Anthropologist

Dick Hayne went shopping a couple years back.

It was spring, and Hayne, an avid vegetable gardener, needed seeds. He also needed some tomato plants, a pair of canvas gloves and a hoe, all in order to continue to cultivate the tiny patch of Eden behind his Chestnut Hill home.

So he drove to a garden center. He parked, got out of his car, walked across the lot toward the store. Then Dick Hayne stopped.

He noticed something. Namely, the other cars in the lot: a brand-new Mercedes here, some shiny BMWs there, a lustrous Escalade over there. On the other side, a shimmering sea of Jags and Saabs and Lexi.

Once inside, Hayne quickly forgot all about his shopping list. He was too busy trying to spot the owners of all those fabulous cars. Turns out they were easy to recognize: women with oversize Chanel sunglasses perched atop $400 highlights, their Lilly Pulitzer golf skirts peeking out from underneath Tory Burch tunics, accessorized by impeccable Red Door manicures that revealed a group fondness for bougainvillea and an aversion to weeding it. Going about their errands, the women stood out against the backdrop of the center’s wide gray shelving, bulky plastic supermarket carts and displays of Miracle-Gro. And thus it was there, amid the concrete aisles, that Dick Hayne found his next customers.

So when Hayne says “I’ve spent my life studying women” — and he does — this is what he means. The statement isn’t about being James Bond, but rather being Jim Cramer: seeing women not as a commodity, but as a market.