No store hesitates to send me their mass emails promoting the latest caveat-ridden offer for free shipping. But occasionally, out of boredom or frustration with bézier curve drawing in Scheme, I click on their lures to buy more products I probably (or definitely) don't need. (With all the data these websites collect about me, would it be so difficult to figure out that I probably won't want to buy a plaid skirt, even at 40% off?)

Anyway, a few minutes ago I clicked on the latest email from Saks.com touting their designer sale. There were a few items I might have purchased on a whim, simply because they really were pretty good deals. But on each of the seven items I almost added to my shopping cart, I was confronted by the fact that the site only had sizes XL and XXL available.

I've written about this before. I think I called it second hand obesity. But the frequency with which I encounter this problem — regardless of whether or not a particular item is on sale — leads me to think that perhaps other forces are at work.

I have two new hypotheses. Perhaps the buyers for department stores are just bad economists. In other words, they have yet to realize, after several years of obvious signals from consumers, that not everyone wants to buy raincoats the size of a small tent. Admittedly, that theory strikes me as dubious.

Alternately, perhaps high-end department stores purposely buy large sizes in excess to make their customers feel better about themselves. It seems at least plausible to imagine that people will feel better looking at a rack of clothes knowing that, even if they take an "L" shirt off the rack, that some other more unfortunate soul will have to ashamedly take the "XXL" number right beside it. Or, to rephrase, people feel better about themselves knowing there's someone even more overweight out in the world. After all, there's quite a bit of evidence to suggest, at least when it comes to income, people's happiness is tied more to relative income, not absolute income. Even if the stores only manage to have consumers take the excess crazy huge clothes off their hands at steep discounts, the improved "atmosphere" of their stores might lead to a net benefit to the bottom line.