dressing room dilemma

I can make a complaint out of absolutely anything. You probably know that by now. Yesterday, as I was shopping, I found one more thing to add to the ever-growing list of complaints. Dressing rooms. It's not that I don't like them. The problem is that every store has a different type of dressing room. They can't all just settle on a standard structure that suits everybody. There are just some things I don't like...

1. Dimly Lit Dressing Rooms: The purpose of the dressing room is to be able to try on the clothes and admire yourself in them, while deciding whether or not you'd like to purchase those clothes. The job of determining whether or not to buy said clothes is made ten times harder by the fact that you can't see them when you're in a dark dressing room!

2. Dressing Rooms Without Mirrors: Not only does it prevent the act of self-admiration in clothing that may or may not be bought based on the positive or negative results of that self-admiration, it forces you to exit the dressing room to admire along with every other woman in the store in the big mirror. When you haven't even decided if you want to buy something because you think it might not flatter your figure, it's not a good idea to force the consumer to try it out in front of everybody. You want to make sure that the article of clothing looks good on you before you try it out in public, not while you're out in public. And you might be thinking that nobody is going to be looking at you anyway, but you're wrong. Somebody is always looking, especially if you're in a group of women.

3. Small Dressing Rooms: If I don't have enough elbow room, things don't go so well. Dressing rooms the size of telephone booths just won't cut it. Each store should build the room with enough space so that each woman is able to practice her runway strut back and forth without running into the walls.

4. Dressing Rooms With Curtains: The problem with curtains is that I don't enjoy having to be worried that someone will walk on me in the process of dressing & undressing. At least with stalls, you can look under to see someone's feet and realize that the stall is occupied. With curtains, you just have to guess. I don't want to be on the other end of someone who doesn't guess very well.

5. Stores With Only One Dressing Room: I don't know why some stores think it's okay to have one dressing room for the entire store. Every woman who goes in there to buy something is going to want to try it on. Every woman who tries something on is going to want to hog the dressing room for at least 15 minutes (or more, depending on the amount of clothes she wants to buy). The line gets ridiculously long. I say, each store should have a dressing-room-to-woman ratio of at least 1 to 4.

Ideally, every store should have about 15 dressing rooms, 10 ft. by 10 ft., with a mirror that wraps around the whole dressing room, and a spotlight centered on a raised platform where I can properly admire myself while deciding not to buy the overpriced clothing that the store is trying to sell me.