Walmart Ditches Fitting Rooms In Online Imitation

Remember the few short years ago when the only retailers selling clothes online were the ones crazy enough to do it. Now, there are subscription boxes and digital personal stylists that can make up the gap between customer service through traditional in-store channels and the convenience and lower prices of online shopping.

Now, however, the influence of not just online retail but the consumer expectations wrought from its advent are having a reverse-flow kind of effect on brick-and-mortar retail, and it might be a signal of the in-store times to come.

Front and center is Walmart’s recent decision to scale back the number of fitting rooms in stores located in Quebec and the Canadian Maritimes. Rather than a spat over the recent political fixation on the lavatory space, Walmart is instead experimenting with a new store concept that borrows heavily from online shopping — maximize inventory and let customers handle the returns later.

“We are always looking for ways to improve the selection of products we offer our customers,” a Walmart spokesperson told The Chronicle Herald. “As such … we are trialing the elimination of change rooms in some of our locations in Quebec and the Maritimes in an effort to increase floor space, including our location in Truro.”

Getting rid of a few hundred square feet worth of fitting rooms might not make much of a difference when it comes to showing off more inventory, but Walmart’s decision signals something of a shift in how brick-and-mortar retailers envision the purpose of physical selling space. As more and more focus is put on the entertaining experience of stepping into a store, less and less is shone upon the connective tissue that used to make those stores all-inclusive shopping centers. Before consumers could have clothes arrive at their doorstep, the process of browsing, fitting and buying apparel was all localized within four walls and a ceiling.

However, now that online shipping has become fast and affordable enough to achieve something that appears to be scale, retailers and shoppers alike are wiling to buy into a new narrative that not all of those elements have to occur under provided auspices.

Like any such fundamental change, such disruptive shifts have positives and negatives for each side. Regardless of the net, what’s clear is that shipping — the new connective tissue of the online age — will be required of every retail, big or small, as a mandate of selling to the modern consumer.

“You’re going to see a lot more retailers that are doing it in Canada and certainly in the United States,” Harley Finkelstein, chief operating officer of Shopify, told The Globe and Mail. “And eventually, you’re going to see most places doing free returns.”

The influence of free shipping has been a well-known commodity ever since people realized Amazon wasn’t just another flash in the pan, but the effect it’s precipitated in the average consumer — and, by proxy, some B&M retailers who are now racing to adapt — was much less understood. After all, retailers held fast to traditional concepts, like fitting rooms, because they were sure their consumers wanted them. If that’s no longer the case, then who knows what else is sacred when it comes to features of in-store shopping?

To combat online shopping’s massive inventory, might stores minimize checkout counters to spare more rack space? At the rate mobile POS systems are going, that might not be as farfetched as it seems — at least, not as farfetched as ditching fitting rooms would have a few years ago.