This Walmart mannequin has a body like, well, no one.

I am not the type of person who usually balks at the way clothing is advertised, whether in the media or in stores. I think we’re all aware that store mannequins’ bodies aren’t necessarily representative of actual people’s bodies. However, what I saw at our local Walmart made me take pause and consider that the mannequin in front of me likely could not exist in human form.

As I was walking through the store, I saw this half-mannequin on an endcap near the activewear:

This photo likely doesn’t quite do justice to how thin this mannequin lady looks. (I say “mannequin,” but she’s really just a torso with no head, no legs,and no arms.) What she does have is an impossibly thin waist.

The Avia pants she’s wearing are a size 0-2 X-Small, and…

… a good portion of the fabric is pinned around the back of the half-mannequin. Okay, she doesn’t have a backside or a rear, so that may be expected. However, I just couldn’t get over how tiny the waist was on this thing! Right near this display was a big bin of movie box candy. I grabbed a box of Whoppers, and…

Yeah. It’s that small. Just in case you might think there’s some sort of photo trickery involved here, I took another shot with the box at another angle:

And, lest you think this is an oversized box of Whoppers (it isn’t) I headed over to the school supply aisle and grabbed a ruler…

The box is 6 3/4″ inches long. Let me give you just one more photo for perspective on how small this span actually is:

A dollar bill is six inches wide. Are we to believe a woman — any adult woman (again, this was in the women’s department, not the girls’) has a side-to-side waist measurement of around six inches?  

I was shopping with my sons, and they agreed that the mannequin’s waist was smaller than a child’s waist. One of my sons said he thought his three-year-old cousin had a larger waist. My other son decided to see how he measured up:

His waist is both wider than the Whoppers box and wider than the mannequin’s. He’s eight years old. He weighs 56 pounds. 

I get that stores are displaying clothing on an “ideal” body, but this can’t possibly be anyone’s ideal..!