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National park shops blind to those who walk through their doors

From the Top of the Pile
Brian Zinchuk

National park shops blind to those who walk through their doors

By Brian Zinchuk

During our holidays this summer we spent some time wandering through the Wasagaming townsite at Riding Mountain National Park in southwest Manitoba. As usual, we walked through a lot of the shops, and bought little, if anything, beyond candy.

That’s because, despite passing through around 10 shops which carried clothing – mostly women's clothing – nearly all of it was for women of a certain size. If you were a size 2 to maybe a 10, you could shop at any one of these shops and have more selection than you can possibly imagine. If you were “plus size,” good luck. You might find a few clothes on a rack in the back in just a few of the shops.

Earlier in the day I took a walk along the beach boardwalk, taking in the sights, as it were. And I was struck by how few of the people there were of the “thin and beautiful” type, especially as a proportion of the total number present. (Just so you know, I often describe myself as “fat and ugly,” calling a spade a spade. I was good looking once, but now I can afford food.)

I pointed this out to my lovely wife as we were driving out of the park, and we started keeping track of the number of plus-sized women vs. the thin types the stores catered to. What we found was the majority of the women we saw would not fit into the clothes being sold.

I seem to recall similar wares in stores in Banff and Jasper. Lots of clothes for scrawny women, not so much for the rest of humanity.

Driving out of Wasagaming I realized that the entire retail sector of the park had failed miserably. The food sector was serving plenty of sweets – candies, icing coated beavertails, large poutines, 1,000-calorie ice cream sundaes, sumptuous baked goods – all the type you would think a size 2 person would eschew, and a thicker person, not so much. The clothing stores had hundreds of people, perhaps thousands on a long weekend, walking through them, most muttering to themselves that they could only fit in those clothes if they lost half a person. In that, I presume most weren’t feeling too good about themselves, either, after having walked through a whole blocks of shops and finding nothing that fit and looked good.

Another connection I made was that these frustrated people had money. They had money to visit the park in the first place, to spend while they were there, and, obviously, they weren’t starving. But the clothing stores did not offer items for them to buy. Another thing is that thinner people are usually younger people, who have much less disposable income compared with older, and usually thicker, people.

Let’s face it, it you are a plus-size woman, there’s only a half dozen or so clothing retailers in the marketplace who cater to your size. If you’re size 6, there are entire malls catering to you. Now look up and down those malls and tell me how many you see of one body type, and then the other. The fashion sector itself fills catalogues and magazines with rail-thin models who don’t in any way reflect our affluent, calorie-rich society. There is nearly wholesale failure to address the realities of the 2016 Canadian body type.

If the 10 or so Wasagaming clothing stores accurately reflected the people walking through the park’s townsite, every single one of them would have more plus-sized clothing than “normal” clothes. The racks in the back would have the size 4 fare. If any of it was any good, I imagine it would fly off the racks.

The retail market at this park failed the populace who attended it. Perhaps if someone was enterprising, and daring enough, to cater to the real people who visit these places, they could make a killing.

They should be selling to their real customers, not some fanciful skinny stereotype they wish they had.

Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.