While doing research on plus size shopping for my book, I walked into a store looked at the outrageous prices, saw the look the sales woman gave me, the What the fuck is this fat woman without trimmed eyebrows doing in my store? and walked out. I hadn't been savvy yet of recognizing places by sight that don't have plus sizes. I'm sure if I had been buying something for a thin friend the sales clerk would have rather listened to nails on a chalk board than serve me.
Recently Oprah Winfrey,, who most of the planet knows, for some reason was not recognized in a store in Zurich. Oprah was looking at handbags, asked for a pricy one, when a clerk insisted she look at cheaper items.
If I was ever mega wealthy, I wouldn't shop in stores that wouldn't have given me the time of day now and I would never buy a $38,000 dollar handbag unless it was an actual Bag of Holding (For non-gamers the bag of holding can hold large amounts of heavy items including swords, foods, mounts, potions, gold etc,).
Oprah felt that this slight was racial bias; Heidi Moore of the Guardian felt it was also due to her size.
Race is tied with socioeconomic status struggles; so is weight. There have been some studies of a link between a woman's size and her socioeconomic status, showing that women with low incomes tend to be of higher weight. There are many theories on this – because of unsocial working hours, lower availability of healthy food in poor neighborhoods, and other factors that may affect food choice and metabolism.
I think that these attitudes towards fat people aren’t necessarily poor food. If I was looking for a retail job, who do you think would hire me? The high end boutique or Walmart? Oprah’s talented, smart, beautiful, sand avvy, but she cannot be the only fat black American woman who is. (She is the only black face in Forbes' Richest Americans list coming in at 152.) As Moore points out:
Oprah was looking to buy a handbag, which has no size measurements, but the product is not the point: in an upscale boutique, all buyers are judged, in part, by their weight.
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