u/LittleMsSavoirFaire

My family was involved with fundraising for an osteoporosis charity from the time I was knee high so the whole Women's Health Initiative thing was horseshit and estrogen was incredibly protective was known to me and I have always resolved to be on HRT at the earliest indication.

So I'm interested in how many of you post that your wives are disinterested in HRT and I was wondering if you have a sense of why?

These are my top guesses:

1. general sense that HRT should be used sparingly (WHI treatment guidance)

2. figure that HRT is a long term health project involving lots of tweaking they'd rather not take on

3. general aversion to extended interaction with healthcare generally, whether because of previous medical gaslighting or because it's expensive or because the symptoms don't feel like they are extreme enough to be taken seriously

Your thoughts?

A lot of people seemed to enjoy my last logistics-industry post so I found the other one referenced. Not a ton of new information but I thought many of you would enjoy your guesses about sizing choices and buying activity explicitly confirmed.

---

E-COMMERCE & RETAIL Millions of Americans are shrinking, and it's creating a logistics headache About 1 in 8 U.S. adults are currently on a GLP-1 drug like Ozempic, Wegovy, or Zepbound. By 2030, JPMorgan estimates that number could hit 30 million. And now that GLP-1s come in pill form, adoption is about to accelerate even faster.

Here's why this matters for logistics: these people need new clothes. A lot of new clothes.

According to Circana, 80% of GLP-1 users say they'll need a new wardrobe because of size changes. Over half have already started buying. Bernstein estimates that if each user drops about three sizes and buys five to eight items per size, that translates to somewhere between 150 million and 700 million additional apparel items purchased this year alone. The upper bound? An extra $13 billion in annual U.S. apparel spending.

The winners so far:

Stitch Fix saw it early. They've been running targeted marketing campaigns since September 2024, working with influencers who take GLP-1s and building dedicated landing pages. Client mentions of weight loss in styling requests have tripled over the past two years and jumped 75% year-over-year last quarter.

ThredUp is winning on both sides. GLP-1 users are buying smaller sizes AND selling their old wardrobes. Purchase volume for large, XL, and plus-sized clothing grew 6% in March 2026 year-over-year, while small and medium dropped 6%.

Victoria's Secret reported a roughly 3% swing downward in bra band and underwear sizes, which the CEO attributed directly to GLP-1s.

The losers, at least for now:

Destination XL, the big-and-tall men's retailer, is getting hammered. Their CEO estimates 25% of customers are on GLP-1s. Total sales fell 6% year-over-year last quarter, and the CEO said the impact is worse than they expected.

Torrid, the women's plus-size chain, reported a 14% year-over-year sales decline and is closing 30 stores in the first half of 2026 after shutting 151 locations last year.

The inventory headache: This is where it gets interesting for warehouses and 3PLs. Retailers traditionally order on a 1-2-2-1 size curve (one small, two mediums, two larges, one XL). That's shifting to 2-2-1-1. Size curve accuracy has historically been 20-50%, and GLP-1s are making it even harder to forecast. A fashion retailer doing $1 billion in annual sales could lose $20 million in margin due to size-curve mismatches alone.

Target's extended-size offerings fell by 37% from March 2025 to March 2026. Old Navy's plus-size options dropped 12% year-over-year. The industry is adjusting in real time, and that means more returns, more markdowns, and more inventory churn flowing through fulfillment networks.

For 3PLs: If you serve apparel brands, expect shifting SKU mixes, faster inventory turns in certain size ranges, and potentially higher return volumes as people buy clothes that don't fit their rapidly changing bodies. The brands that figure out how to serve customers during a physical transformation (not just at the end of one) are going to generate a lot of fulfillment volume.

This is stretching the definition of research but I'm in logistics and I caught this in one of the industry newsletters:

E-COMMERCE & RETAIL Your customers are losing weight faster than your warehouse can keep up Back in Edition 45, we told you the GLP-1 wave was about to flood apparel fulfillment with new orders. Millions of people dropping sizes, buying whole new wardrobes, generating a wall of volume. That was the optimistic half of the story.

This week we got the other half. The returns.

People losing weight on Ozempic don't just buy new clothes once and stop. They drop a size, buy a medium, the medium is too big in three weeks, they send it back and order a small. At peak weight loss, GLP-1 users can drop a clothing size every single month. So instead of one clean wardrobe refresh, you get a customer who's a moving target for half a year.

And the data is showing up everywhere.

Farnam Elyasof, who runs a budget suit shop called FlexSuits, has watched returns climb 50% in the past year. His tell is when a customer orders the same suit in two or three sizes at once. He's started literally asking people if they're on a weight-loss journey before they buy. Narvar, which handles returns for a few dozen retailers, found that exchanges where the shopper sized down hit a record 14.6% in 2025, up every year for three years running. And June Adel, a small women's brand, says the reason for its returns flipped completely: a year ago, "too big" or "weight loss" accounted for 30 to 40% of returns. Now it's at least 60%.

The really painful part is the size curve, which we flagged in Edition 45 and is now getting worse. The returns aren't spread evenly. They're concentrated in medium, large, and XL, because that's where everyone's sizing down from. So you've got the highest return rates landing exactly on the inventory retailers ordered the most of. A $1 billion apparel brand can lose $20 million in margin from a 5-to-10-point return bump, and that's before you count the markdowns on out-of-season stuff coming back.

Retailers are fighting back the only ways they can. Doubling restocking fees. Rewriting size charts. Begging customers to measure themselves before checkout. One retailer doubled its restocking fee to 20% of the purchase price. None of it works fully because the underlying problem isn't poor sizing information. It's that the customer's body is genuinely a different size than it was when they hit "buy."

For 3PLs, this is a reverse-logistics problem. If you fulfill apparel, your inbound returns volume is currently higher than usual, and it's lumpy in ways your forecasts weren't built for. The brands that survive this are the ones treating a shrinking customer base as a multi-month relationship rather than a single transaction, and the warehouses that serve them will need a returns operation that can absorb much more churn without falling over.

I'm reading a book right now with the stereotypical meddling mother. "You're too fat, you're gonna lose your looks before you land a man, you won't have time for babies!"

The FMC is a badass in other respects but she just sits there and takes it, and nobody in her life stands up for her.

It can't be good for me to sit here fantasizing about the absolute verbal lashing I would give, the physical access I would restrict, and the driving need to fuck with whoever had the audacity to impose their shitty opinions on me.

Got any suggestions for FMCs who will do that for me?

Contemporary, please.