Two articles seen during my lunchtime reading have gotten me started thinking about forms of discrimination…. but probably not the type you’re thinking off when I use the word.
The first is price discrimination. The LA Times is reporting on how Bloomingdales is opening three more outlet stores. Outlet stores are one way companies do price discrimination: attempting to find the highest price some class of people are willing to pay for goods. In some cultures, this is done by bargaining, but we don’t have the time to do that for everything. Bloomies is seeking price discrimination by having higher prices in their main stores, in higher-price paying areas, and lower prices for the same goods in areas that aren’t willing to pay more. Other ways of price discrimination are coupons, sales, groupons, and many others.
The second is size discrimination, but in the price discrimination sense. In other words: what size garments must women think they fit in order to buy clothes (men, apparently, don’t care about the size labels on their clothes). The NY Times has a nice article on the crazy quilt of womens sizing, where what you wear in one manufacturer’s garments doesn’t work for a different manufacturer… but no one is willing to change things. Why? Size discrimination, in the sense that more people will buy your clothes if they think they fit in a smaller size.
I tried to find a third article on this type of discrimination: that is, finding an acceptable value (price, size) of something that makes it acceptable to purchase, but couldn’t in my quick skim of articles. Perhaps there’s one in color discrimination: people will only buy this year’s colors, even though the choice of colors is completely arbitrary (the same is true for cars, by the way). So I’ll turn the question over to you: how do you deal with this form of discrimination in purchasing, and what factors about a product influence you in purchasing it? [Given: we’re a bunch of engineers here, so of course performance is a factor.]
