The changing room has a stool in it now. This is not progress.

It is velvet. It is the colour of a boiled sweet. It is about thirty centimetres square and it has been placed, with what I assume was intent, in the exact centre of the only part of the changing room where a person could previously turn around.

Somebody has been on a course. I know this because the stool has arrived at the same time as a scented candle on the counter and a sign by the till in a font that is trying to be handwriting, and these three things always travel together. A consultancy has visited. There has been a presentation about the in-store experience. Slides were shown.

Nobody in that meeting stood in this cubicle with a coat, a bag, three garments on a hook meant for one, and a curtain that does not meet the wall on the left-hand side.

A brief inventory

The hook is at the height of a tall man's elbow, which means the hem of anything long rests on the floor, which the floor is not clean enough for. There is one. There has only ever been one, in every changing room I have entered since 1998, and the number of garments a person brings in is never one, because the entire purpose of the room is comparison.

The mirror is angled upward from the skirting, on the theory that this is flattering. What it actually does is prevent you from seeing the thing you came in to see, which is whether the garment is doing something peculiar at the back.

The lighting is overhead and directly above, a decision made by someone who has never looked at a human face from that angle and lived with the consequences.

And there is now a stool.

The economics of a gesture

I am not against the stool in principle. Somewhere to put a bag that is not the floor is a genuine improvement and I would have welcomed one about two feet to the left.

What interests me is that a stool is the intervention that got approved. A second hook costs four pounds and twenty minutes of a maintenance visit. Moving the mirror is a morning. Neither photographs. Neither can be described in a slide as a warmer, more considered experience. A velvet cube in a fashionable colour is a thing you can point at, and pointing at things is what the meeting was for.

This is not a conspiracy. It is simply what happens when the people improving a space are working from a photograph of it.

The curtain

While we are here. The curtain does not meet the wall on the left. It has never met the wall on the left. In some shops there is a second curtain, offset, which is a solution that works and costs the price of a curtain.

Instead there is a small ritual, conducted by everyone, in which you pull the fabric across and hold it for a moment to see whether it will stay, and it does not, and you adjust it, and it does not, and eventually you accept that you will be changing at an angle. Every woman reading this knows the angle. It is about forty degrees, facing the back wall, and we have all been standing in it for twenty-five years.

What I would have instead

Three hooks. A full-length mirror mounted flat. A light at head height on both sides rather than one above. Enough floor to get a dress over your head without putting an elbow through the curtain. A bell, or a button, or any means at all of communicating with a member of staff that does not involve opening the curtain while wearing something that does not fasten.

None of it is expensive. All of it is invisible in a photograph. That is the entire problem and it will not be solved by anything that arrives in a delivery with a candle.

The stool is still there. I moved it into the corner, tried the coat, bought nothing, and put the stool back where I found it on the way out, because I am not an animal.