Theft is the reason usually given. Labor is the reason that keeps surfacing underneath it. And in the most-watched case of 2026, no reason was given at all.
Four companies have closed their fitting rooms in the last three years. Their stated reasons do not match, and the gap between them is the story.
In June 2026 the teen retailer closed the fitting rooms at all 55-plus of its US stores. Employees in New York, Boston, and Austin told the BBC they had been directed to shut them permanently. The Guardian reported the closures covered the UK and Canada as well.
The company has never issued a public statement about why.
Employees gave reporters two different explanations. Some cited theft. Others cited vandalism, specifically a TikTok trend of shoppers sticking chewing gum to the curtains to hold them closed, because the curtains would not stay shut on their own.
Sit with that second one. The reported vandalism was customers improvising a fix for a fitting room that did not work. The response was to remove the fitting room.
This is a brand whose entire model is one size fits most. Removing the ability to try on is not a policy adjustment for that model. It is the removal of the only step where a customer finds out whether "most" includes her.
Returns run 14 to 21 days, exchange or store credit only. So she cannot settle fit in the store, and she cannot get her money back when she settles it at home.
Sometimes. Rarely all of it. And the industry's own numbers make that hard to argue with.
In 2023 the National Retail Federation claimed organized retail crime accounted for nearly half of the $94.5 billion in industry shrink. Retail Dive found the figure came from an inference drawn off congressional testimony. The NRF retracted it. The Vera Institute puts organized retail crime's actual share around 5 percent.
Now look at the split the NRF does stand behind. In its own survey, roughly 63 percent of shrink comes from internal causes and about 36 percent from all external theft combined, shoplifting included.
Two thirds of the problem is inside the building. The public conversation is entirely about the other third.
Watch what happens when companies do explain themselves.
Goodwill of Colorado closed fitting rooms at 41 of its 42 stores in 2023. Its communications manager told CBS Colorado the decision came down to safety, citing drug use, vandalism, and reported shoplifting incidents that nearly doubled between January and May of that year. That is a theft answer, stated plainly.
Goodwill Industries of the Valleys closed fitting rooms at all its locations in July 2023 and gives a different answer entirely on its own FAQ page: keeping fitting rooms open and maintained requires additional staffing and expenses the organization is not equipped to manage, and moving those resources elsewhere lets its retail teams focus on stocking the sales floor. Theft is not mentioned once.
Sainsbury's permanently closed all its changing rooms in the UK in 2025 and said the move was about simplifying tasks in stores. Also a labor answer, stated plainly.
The Guardian's own read on the trend is blunter than any of them: removing a changing room lets a brand reduce the staff it needs, security included, while freeing up floor space to sell more stock.
Same decision, four companies. One says theft. Two say staffing and workload. And Brandy Melville gave no reason at all, which tells you something about how confident anyone was in the one they had.
One, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal.
Retail consultant Catherine Shuttleworth has pointed out that the behavior has changed. The old pattern was try it on, then buy it at the register. The new pattern for many shoppers is try it on, then order it online later, sometimes from a competitor. A retailer paying rent, payroll, and shrink on a room that closes someone else's sale has a real grievance.
That is an argument for capturing the sale in the room, not for removing the room. The customer standing in your fitting area holding your garment is the warmest lead in retail. If she walks out and buys it on her phone that evening, the failure happened in the six feet outside the curtain where nobody was standing.
Shuttleworth makes a second point worth hearing, and it is the one most retailers should be embarrassed by. Many fitting rooms are miserable. Too small to stretch your arms. Overhead lighting that finds every insecurity. No way to get another size without getting fully dressed and going back out to the floor yourself.
If that is your fitting room, closing it is not what is costing you the sale. It was already costing you the sale.
Because a line measures decisions customers made about you months ago, not the one you made last week. Brand equity is a bank account. You can draw it down for a long time before the balance shows on the statement.
Retail professionals reported packed stores through the summer in Toronto, Newport, London, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, at locations that had already lost their fitting rooms. Early coverage suggested sales may even be up. Every expert said this was a disaster. The line did not move.
Three reasons a line survives a bad decision.
The line is the product. For this customer the store is a place to go with friends on a Saturday. Waiting outside is not a cost of the visit, it is the visit. That demand was built over a decade and it does not switch off in a quarter.
The customer replaces herself. A brand aimed at 13 to 17 year olds gets a fresh cohort every year who never knew the fitting rooms existed. Churn hides the defection. Your loyal customer leaves and her younger sister arrives, and the traffic count looks identical.
Traffic is a lagging indicator. Erosion shows up first in conversion, then units per transaction, then average ticket, and only last in the door count. If you manage to the door count you will find out last.
Ask a different question than "are they still busy." Ask what the same store looks like against the same week two years ago, and what a customer who bought four times a year is buying now.
More than the space it cost.
The queue outside a fitting room is not dead time for a teenage customer. It is where she stands with friends, where the photos get taken, where a purchase gets a second opinion from the person who came with her. The wait was generating the brand heat. The dressing room was the excuse to hang out with friends in front of a mirror instead of behind a screen.
That is not a soft benefit. A second opinion at the moment of decision is the most reliable close in apparel and it costs the retailer nothing. You cannot buy it back with a smart mirror.
Deborah Weinswig, CEO of Coresight Research, has said that Gen Z traffic converts substantially higher when the trip includes a fitting room visit, and that around 78 percent of Gen Z prefer buying in store to see and feel product, 75 percent shop in store to confirm fit, and 67 percent value physical stores specifically because they can try clothing on.
A brand that sells one size to teenage girls removed the step that 75 percent of them say is the reason they came.
The retailers with the most to lose.
Zara is rebuilding rather than removing. At its revamped Oxford Street store the changing room area was widened into individual wood-panelled rooms, and sensory tags alert staff to what is being tried on so they can help the shopper and get merchandise back to the floor faster.
Read that last part again, because it is the whole argument in one fixture. Research published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management found that unattended fitting rooms create phantom stockouts, merchandise stranded in a room that your inventory system still counts as available, and that a dedicated fitting room associate raised sales roughly 22.4 to 22.7 percent by fixing exactly that. Zara built the fix into the hardware.
Rixo put a coffee kiosk and a cocktail bar in its west London flagship, with pods lit by natural light. On Bond Street the changing room has come with champagne for years.
One group treats the fitting room as a cost center to be eliminated. The other treats it as the reason someone left the house. Watch which group is still opening stores in five years.
Four things.
Do not read your traffic count as a verdict. It is the slowest number you have. Conversion moves first.
Know which shrink you actually have. If two thirds of industry shrink is internal, a customer-facing restriction may be aimed at the smaller half of your problem while your process and your payroll go unexamined.
Count what a policy removes, not just what it saves. Every restriction has a savings number attached and almost never a cost number, because nobody is assigned to produce one. The absence of a cost number is not the same as the absence of a cost.
Watch who leaves quietly. Nobody files a complaint about a store they simply stopped visiting. Your angriest customer is still a customer. The one who moved to a competitor never told you.
Brand equity buys you time. It does not buy you an exemption. The lines outside are not proof that the decision was right. They are proof that the bill has not arrived yet.
Why are stores closing fitting rooms? The reason usually given publicly is theft. The reasons companies give in their own words more often involve staffing and workload. Goodwill Industries of the Valleys and Sainsbury's both cited labor rather than theft, and removing a changing room lets a retailer cut staff, including security, while freeing floor space for stock.
Why did Brandy Melville close its fitting rooms? The company has never publicly said. Employees told the BBC in June 2026 that they were directed to close them permanently, with some citing theft and others citing vandalism from a TikTok trend involving chewing gum on the curtains.
Which retailers have closed their fitting rooms? Brandy Melville across the US, UK, and Canada in 2026; Sainsbury's across the UK in 2025; and Goodwill organizations in Colorado and Virginia in 2023.
Is shoplifting the main cause of retail shrink? No. According to the National Retail Federation's own survey, roughly 63 percent of shrink comes from internal causes and about 36 percent from all external theft combined. The NRF retracted its widely quoted claim that organized retail crime caused nearly half of shrink.
Read next: Do fitting rooms increase sales? and Should we close our fitting rooms to prevent theft?