Why clothing stores are getting rid of change rooms

Walmart Canada’s decision to ditch change rooms has less to do with the future of retail and more to do with a nagging legacy of theft, which costs the brand $3 billion a year.

The recent announcement by Walmart that it will be cutting change rooms out of the mix at three of its stores – locations in Truro, N.S., Charlottetown, P.E.I. and Montreal, Que. – has been positioned by the brand as a way to “make more space for apparel.”

“We are always looking for ways to improve the selection of products we offer our customers,” Anika Malik, Walmart’s Canadian manager of corporate affairs told The Chronicle Herald in Halifax. “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.”

But retail consultant and analyst Ed Strapagiel says the decision probably has less to do with innovation than the brand lets on.

“I suspect that talk of making the stores friendlier with greeters and of providing more room for apparel by cutting back on change rooms is just public relations spin,” says Strapagiel.

He says re-instating greeters is part of the same sort of thinking.

“It’s incredulous that several stores simultaneously ‘took it upon themselves’ to cut back on change rooms… I suspect that Walmart is experimenting with this as a way to cut down shrinkage, a.k.a. shoplifting, which they apparently have been studying,” he says. “They can’t put video surveillance in the change rooms, so they just get rid of (them).”

While Walmart doesn’t really need to innovate in the dressing room sphere, there are some retailers who have started to look at how they could bring the digital experience – which proliferates in the industry through apps and e-commerce – to the ‘trying on clothes’ aspect of shopping.

Stateside, upscale retailers like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, have run “smart dressing room” pilots using full length mirrors that double as websites offering product reviews, suggestions of other items to complete the look or simply just paging an employee to get assistance with sizes.

“The way customers shop for clothes has evolved,” Jamie Nordstrom, the retailer’s head of stores and former leader of its Nordstrom Direct digital business, told Fortune. “How do we take all the information that’s available to customers while they’re sitting on the couch at home browsing and add that to the dressing rooms, so it’s the best of both worlds?”

Toronto-based technology lab Kinetic Café has experimented with a similar concept for shoe brand Aldo’s store at the Freedom Tower in New York City, using a smart mirror to offer fashion advice and visual cues to shoppers.

“Retail is obviously a huge leading-edge space and opportunity to explore connectivity,” Chris Carder, co-founder of Kinetic Café told Yahoo Finance in an earlier interview. “We want to transform the entire experience of that person – from the second you’re approaching that store to the second that you leave.”

But there’s a difference in the innovation seen by high-end or even fast fashion retailers and what’s going on with Walmart, adds Strapagiel.

“There are clothes and there are clothes,” he says. “One goes to Walmart for casual, everyday wear, for which trying-on is not as important as, say, if you’re looking for dress wear or a suit for a job interview – small, medium, large and extra large aren’t that tough to figure out.”