Female Obesity: The New Fear for Shopping Women

Being a female is hard enough in the world today, but being an obese female can make life even tougher. Many women who are facing obesity on a daily basis tend to suffer through obstacles that skinny women would never face in their entire life. Not only is being obese a health risk and problem, it is also a crasher of your social status and world around you.

Let's say that you were a female shopper in a high end clothing store and you were obese. The store does sell plus size clothing, but its way in the back hidden out of view of their regular customers. You walk up to a sales clerk whose job it is to help you find what your looking for and treat you with the most up right respect; she may act rude, show no eye contact, or show hostility towards you; or she may simply ignore you and walk off to serve another customer, one that isn't in your social standard. How does that make you feel? Depressed, sad, or perhaps angry. This happens to hundreds of obese females a day and it doesn't help their moods, their feelings and tends to drive them to eat even more which in turn makes them gain even more weight, causing even more internal pain.

In a study conducted in Houston between obese women and non obese women, it discovered that there is a discrimination that does take place in many stores. Women who were not obese didn't experience the discrimination as did the obese women. Some of the obese women who expressed that they were on a diet received less discrimination than the ones who expressed that they were not on a diet and could never go on one. Some of the obese women were casually dressed and they seemed to face the most discrimination from the sales clerk. The women who were professionally dressed still received discrimination, but not as much. Dress code seems to play a major role in our society whether we are overweight or not, but those who tend to experience more discrimination are women who are overweight.

At the end of this study, the conclusion comes out to be that it's not just hurting the female customers who happen to be obese and shop in these particular stores. When these women are rejected and discriminated against, it not only cost the women's self esteem, but it also cost the store that they were rejected in more money. The women will spend less money and in most cases will not shop there again. This is a major concern for a lot of businesses and they should try to keep it under control. Managers should be more aware of what their employees are doing and put an end to anything that should not be happening in the work place such as being rude to the customers.

If this has happened to you, you shouldn't stand for it. Make a scene. Draw the attention to the sales clerk and hopefully pull up the attention of the manager. When a scene is being made, most will comply and the manager will usually take affirmative action against the employees involved. This however doesn't always happen so don't be disappointed if you should return to the store later that week and the same employee is still behind the counter. Sometimes all we can do is live this life one day at a time and enjoy every minute of it. But all at the same time we all should understand that discrimination isn't the way to live it.