Changing Room Rage

ng rooms, while 58% suffered disappointment. Half said they tried on clothes at home to avoid the problem, while 75% said they avoided trying them on at all (yes, these numbers are confusing — more on that in a moment). All of these are apparently symptoms of "changing room rage" or CRR, which can allegedly "lead to shoppers snapping at retail assistants, storming out of stores and even losing self-confidence."

Now, this survey was conducted on behalf of isme.com, which sells clothing (among other things) online, and thus has an obvious stake in making changing rooms sound awful. Those responsible for the survey also don’t seem to have employed much scientific rigor — it’s not really possible for half of women to try on clothes at home and three-quarters of them to refrain from trying them on at all (although this discrepancy could also be a result of sloppy coverage). These concerns aside, though, is it really a shock that some women hate fitting rooms? You wait in line for a long time to enter a small cubicle with bad lighting, where you try on clothes that probably don’t fit (because of sizing inconsistency, or because of the pretty narrow range of sizes many stores carry) while a whole bunch of increasingly angry people wait in line behind you for their turn to be dissatisfied. And if you’ve ever been to a fitting room with your mom, where her sartorial ideas and yours painfully collide, you’ll know why my mom didn’t take me shopping between the ages of 14 and 22. Given all this, changing room rage seems less like a pathology and more like a reasonable response to a shitty situation. And rather than wringing our hands over it, maybe we should take it as a sign that clothing stores need to wake up and be less awful — because the first one that offers a truly pleasant fitting experience is going to make a lot of money.