Why Women Take so Long in the Fitting Room

Vanity sizing - the trick that used to be used by clothing manufacturers to make female customers happy is now backfiring and costing clothing companies major money. The idea of vanity sizing is that manufacturers produce clothing with a larger cut and then labels is with a smaller size, making women feel better about their bodies and encouraging them to purchase more clothing from the same company. Typically the higher priced products will have a larger fit to draw more customers to their clothing line.

The problem is that more and more different manufacturers are using this technique today.

Women today shop in multiple stores for the clothes they desire and if they all stock clothing from different brands the shoppers have a hard time determining what size they need and most people don't want to, nor have the time to, try on three different sizes of each item they're looking at.

Another problem that has arisen is mail order and internet shopping. People are straying away from those concepts because you really need to be able to try on the clothes in order to know that they will fit right. No one wants to spend the $8 shipping and handle fee to get the clothes delivered a week or two later just to put them on and realize they need to spend an additional $8 to mail the clothes back when they don't fit. This is taking away business from those companies whose primary focus is either through catalogs or internet sites.

An easy solution to this problem would be to enforce standardized clothing sizes in the United States like many other countries already do. Men's clothing has been standardized since the Civil War era, their clothing sizes are based off of their body measurements which is logical. All men have to do is go into a store, find something they like and grab their size. There is no way around it, pants that have a tag on them that says 32, will be 32 inches long and will fit a man who wears a size 32.

Numerous attempts have been made by different organizations starting in 1940 including the US Department of Agriculture, the American Society for Testing and Materials, and industry group [TC]2 to standardize women's clothing sizes but no matter how hard they try, manufacturers stick to their own ideas and guidelines which in the long run will end up hurting their businesses even more.

This explains why women take so long when they go shopping so to the men in this world, it isn't our fault. Don't blame the women for trying on multiple sizes of the same article, blame the companies who can't work together to create a standardized sizing chart.