With winter approaching comes the time to buy new sweatshirts. While shopping at Aeropostale yesterday the male worker began telling me all the sale promotions and asked if I needed help. I was looking for a large sweatshirt (because last year I was a medium and assumed I gained a little weight and went up a size). He replied "well we do not have any large, but here is an extra large because we do run small." Immediately, like any teenage girl, I think "oh my gosh! He thinks I am extra large?" and become very self conscious.After going in the changing room and trying on the extra large (that was two sizes larger than last year's sweatshirt) it did not fit. I came back out feeling like "wow! I need to start dieting now!"As I put the sweatshirts away, the man comes back and says "oh, don't like it?" And I replied "No, it just didn't fit right." His reply astounished me."Yeah, we are altering the sizes to accomodate our new demographic age group. Our customers are now junior high and high schoolers so the sizes are becoming smaller to accomodate their bodies. As you can tell with some of the designs, they are more high school." Then, we began talking about jean sizes and he was talking about they should just make all jeans 'size zero and just keep on adding zeros til like fifteen zeros so all girls could feel good about themselves."This whole experience made me so angry. I used to love Aeropostale because it was cheap and affordable. Now, they are trying to change their age group, everything is smaller. Also, his comments, at first, took me off guard, but once he explained why, I understood.I left Aeropostale with a lower self esteem and have a feeling I was not the only one. These stores have such an influence over how we feel about our bodies and weight. And when they start to change their size standards, it makes us feel even more self conscious.