I've been browsing some old forums and ran across this....

  • Published in the Evening Post on 21st Jan 1998....Reuter news report.
  • In the 'Odd spot' column
  • Headline : Park Bloke, shop till you drop
  • A British shopping centre has realised that grown men are just like small children and is opening a creche for them. Unlike traditional creche's this one features beer, TV soccer and video games. A first in Britain, it aims "to take the negatives out of shopping for men", said Nick Thorton, Spokesman for the Bluewater retail center in Kent. Extensive research showed that 50% of couples' shopping trips ended in argument, he said.

Although I dimly recall seeing something like this in Japan near that timeframe, I though it was worth a google.

And it looks like this kind of horseshit is more common than I had thought.

Some articles are more offensive than others...

  • Manland: Ikea's new creche for mollycoddling men
  • https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/oct/02/manland-ikea-creche-eva-wiseman
  • Men are so cute. So hapless. The way they wrinkle up their noses when they smell commitment. The adorable grimace as you wipe yogurt from their beards with a licked hankie and their bubbling glee at the sight of a weighty breast. Poor, pathetic men, bloated with idiocy. Poor little guys, incapable of almost everything. Rarely will a week pass without some recognition of the fact – whether in an advert for washing powder or as the punchline of a sitcom – that grown men must be babysat.

These articles span decades, so this is not just repeated reporting of the same event.

Personally, I don't see any problem with an area for men to wait in while the wife shops, but it is totally unnecessary to call them creches and call men babies.