A cautionary tale and proposal to vastly improve revenues of retailers across the country

Today, I visited the Tesco's on Newmarket road (past Grafton Centre) and was once again impressed by the product range and choice on offer, which puts Sainsbury (in town, that is) to shame.

I found a section selling very cheap shorts (another thing which always impresses me about Tesco's). I chose a pattern and took one off the rack which wrote "S" (small) on the hanger. When I got back home, I realised it was actually an "L"! great... (okay okay, maybe I should have read the tag after all).

This is not the first time this has happened to me - this problem is very widespread. The thing is, although they may help people locate their sizes easily, the size label on the hanger is extraneous especially when hangers are so often inadvertently swapped by customers or even by careless staff. There is no easy way to inspect mismatches either.

Often, it gets so disordered that the labels become entirely pointless, and serve only to mislead the customer. You’ve all been there before - just go shopping in London during the peak of the 50% off summer sale and the letters on the hangers might as well be in Greek. You think, "Oh look here, that's a small size! Better grab it before some other diminutive person does!" (Another complaint - retailers make way too many clothes in big sizes) and then "oh shucks, yet another XXL..."

Standardised hangers without labels will not only improve customer satisfaction, but it presents a good business case to retailer all around the UK: the manufacture and handling of hangers and clothes on hangers would be simplified. I’m not going to go into guesstimates now, but just imagine the stupendous number of "S", "M", "L", and “XL"etc. stickers that get saved each year! Well... maybe we can try one out: turnover of 50 hangers each day x 500 stores (say, in the UK) x 365 days = about a saving of 10 million stickers each year and that is not considering the extra cost of hiring the poor labourer who spends his/her life sticking these stickers onto hangers. And what about the 10 million awful little cubes that come attached on top of hangers of NEXT or Topshop? Those must cost even more...

Add to that the detrimental impact to customer service (and thus total sales) and you get a formidable amount of potential savings. SO... if early next year you begin to see standardised labelless hangers being used in Tesco's, you will know exactly who to thank. Meanwhile, remember to read the real label before you buy your clothes!