Actually, when I was pants shopping a few weeks ago for a trip, I couldn’t find anything in the 32-33" waist range. Even the 34" selections were scarce and anatomically improbable (e.g., 34x27 & 34x37, nothing else).
All of the piles of unsold pants were in the 40"+ waist range. I know the US is the land of the overinflated people*, but I thought that only stocking 40"+ waists was a bit too much. I eventually had to order online to get my size.
We had a taxi driver in China who wouldn’t believe we were American because we weren’t fat. He told the guy translating that we must be Australian.
Look at almost any weight loss ad. The person holds up their old fat pants to show you how much smaller their waist is now. What CanvasShoes is saying is that the fat pants have been pulled into a two-dimensional shape, so you see half the waistband, while the pants the person is wearing are circular, and you only see 1/pi of the waistband.
You know, that obligatory shot of the person standing there in their “skinny” clothes and holding the “fat” clothes they used to wear up in front of them. To show how incredibly wide you used to be. Except if you lay a piece of clothing out flat, it’s going to look wider than if it’s in a circular-ish shape around your body. That’s why if you hold a shirt up to you to get an idea if it fits, you can’t just hold it flat in front of you and say “Yep, wider than I am, it’ll fit.”
Not just older guys. The military had some strict guidelines for weight, body fat, etc. I had one troop who had a huge gut. When I told him he was going to have to go to medical and be put on a fat boy program, he protested, saying: “But Chief, I wear a size 34 pants!” Yeah, but you’ve got a 54" gut, Shamu.