Shopping is supposed to be fun, no matter what your size. But for one woman who went out shopping at a Cardiff Victoria’s Secret, her shopping day turned into a nightmare.
20-year-old Abbie Walsh-Greenfield received a comment from an employee so cruel, it made her leave the store. Now, she’s penned a letter addressing the issue, and the incident has gone viral.
Abby was out shopping with a friend when she noticed the lack of sizes available at Victoria’s Secret. There were plenty of smalls and extra-smalls, but only one large and no extra larges at all for one item. The theme would recur throughout the store, but Abby tried not to let it bother her. What did bother her was a comment made by an employee just a bit later.
Instead of asking Abby if she needed help finding anything, or if she wanted to try an item on, the staff member asked if Abby was “aware of the sizing in this store”. Understandably, she took the question personally. It appeared as though the employee had insinuated that Abby was too big to be shopping at the store, which definitely hit a nerve. Abby left the store feeling fat-shamed and awful. When she got home, she decided to do something about it.
She wrote an open letter to the store on her blog, addressing her concerns and explaining the incident in detail.
“She smiled, and it just all of a sudden looked so fake. And she had a headset on that made her look so important, and the way she stood about a meter or two away from me, made me feel like she didn’t genuinely want to help me. It was only once I had gotten home and replayed the happenings in my head that I realised, had she have said that to someone weaker, or someone who couldn’t take it, or someone who genuinely went into VS to buy something to make them feel special, things could have been different.”
She goes on to say how upset the interaction made her friend, and how much money she ended up dropping at another store. But mostly, she talked about the importance of making shoppers feel comfortable, not bad about themselves.
“And besides that, besides the money which doesn’t really matter, the staff in there were so lovely and kind, and no one questioned my size once, or my friends. They were helpful and informative and actually did what they could to help. They made me feel comfortable.
I don’t actually know what the sales assistant meant by her comment, but surely theres no two ways about it. I can’t even imagine another sentence that she could have tried to say.”
Hopefully that employee will think twice about how she deals with her customers. Body-shaming is a serious issue.
What do you think about the way Abby handled the situation?
