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This doesn’t happen often as I am very much stick to the schedule kind of girl when it comes to my blog, but today something happened which I cannot ignore. Like most things I want to talk about I bring to my blog for you lot to read. I live in a small town which until two weeks ago had hardly any shops, each week it has been opening a variety of shops and today it was time for one of the shops I was most excited about; Outfit. If you don’t know what outfit is, basically it is a huge shop which is filled with mini-shops like Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, Burton and more. I saw a sign earlier in the week saying the first 50 people to go to the shop will receive a gift card of £10 which was a pretty exciting prospect.
When I arrived it was fairly busy as to be expected as M&S had also opened, but after a town has been Topshop less for a while it was totally needed that I went there first. I saw the girl on the door still handing out gift cards and I was super excited as I was going to get one. Two teenage girls in crop tops with lots of make-up on walked in ahead of me and were both handed gift cards, when it came to my turn she looked away same with the woman behind me. When I was stood in the shop I noticed she had given the two pretty girls behind a gift card each. I thought maybe it was an error and just went to have a look around the shop. Whilst in the shop I was suffering from really bad pain so I decided to go take a breather outside and sit on the bench next to the shop. I was sat there for around 10 minutes and realised quickly that it wasn’t a mistake and in fact, they were intentionally giving certain people gift cards. Whilst I was sat there I noticed that the younger skinny and fashionable women were given cards on entry and the older women or overweight ones like myself were not.
When I got home it also dawned on me that NO men had received one which I was watching, although outfit stocks men’s clothes as well as for women. I took to Twitter in fury when I got home and was sent a ton of notifications about how out of order it was. I was furious that a company which is SO big and has so much power treats people differently. I decided to run a Twitter poll which within 15 minutes had over 70 replies. The question was do people who are pretty get treated differently and the poll so far is showing 71% for yes and 23% for sometimes. So it is obviously a problem which happens. I was reached out to by Kirsty who told me she has relieved similar discrimination at a nightclub where women who were skinny and pretty were let in for free and those who weren’t were let in for £20. Gross right? She also told me she and Amie had written posts about this issue and they both rang so true to me, I knew I had to share them with you.
Whilst I was replying to comments on Twitter about my experience I had a tweet from Outfit pop up asking me for my email, so I sent it to them. Shortly after I received an email back, the email stated “The promotion girls are not part of the Arcadia Group, and therefore aren’t representatives of Outfit. This behaviour is not something we condemn.” they also offered me a gift card for a gesture of good will. Something still doesn’t sit right with me? I sent an email back with my concerns and also asking what the policy was on the orignal set of gift cards as some of those people were NOT the 50th, way past it, maybe it was the 50th prettiest people to enter the store? I don’t know. I feel like this an issue which has gone on for TOO LONG and I don’t feel like anybody should be made to feel any less worth than anybody else due to their weight, colour, whether they wear make-up, or if they are worthy of shopping in a particular shop. I just wanted to say thanks to all of the bloggers who have reached out to me this afternoon, you’ve made me feel so much better about myself.
