fat lady shopping gripe

[psocoptera]

I'm now too fat to buy pants in person at REI, bleah. "I would have to find plus sizes online." I know this is in no way a new discovery and some of y'all may have been coping with this shit for years, but, bleah, my thin privilege was *convenient* dammit. I have no idea if I want a 16 or a 16W (ha, or even if 16 is right) and I'm probably going to solve this issue by using my affluence privilege and ordering both and returning one but it would have been so much easier to just try them on when I was in the store today (dropping almost $200 on hiking boots, so fuck the implicit idea that fatties don't shop there).

(Just to be clear, the salesperson I asked was 100% polite about it, and another sales dude spent a really long time helping me with the hiking boots, so, no complaints about REI's courteous and competent sales staff. Their stocking policy bites though.)

ETA: if anyone has a good line on in-person retailers for convertible pants, please let me know. I love me some dorky zip-offs.

Comments

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I have to admit I didn't look exhaustively, and the person I asked did say something like "you might possibly be able to find some around" in addition to suggesting I look online, which I took at the time as a sort of soft no, but maybe there really were some lurking somewhere, who even knows.

Why is 16W a lot bigger than 16, they're the same fricking number, who comes up with this stuff.

[antimony.livejournal.com]

They're two different series of sizes -- technically you can make all of the sizes in either Misses' or Women's, the difference is supposed to be in the curviness, and almost no one makes Women's sizes below 16 or Misses' above 18. And, well, there's so much loosey-goosey in sizing. (Even in men's, where the numbers are ostensibly inches somewhere on the garment.) But it may also be that I find the jump larger than it really is because of what bits of me are usually the limiting factor.

The brand of cycling jerseys where the 1X is a bit bigger all around than the XXL (they make some items in both "standard" and "plus sizing", so you have S/M/L/XL/XXL in the "standard" and 1X/2X/3X in "plus" but they're supposedly the same item), though, I continue to boggle at. (And continue to buy their stuff as both the XXL and the 1X mostly fit me pretty well.)