See Pashigian, B. P.. (1988). Demand Uncertainty and Sales: A Study of Fashion and Markdown Pricing. The American Economic Review, 78(5), 936–953. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1807158
Basic idea: there are more and better priced clearance sales for items that quickly go out of fashion, fewer clearance sales for non-fashionable items (e.g., white shirts, blue blazers, grey pants.)
That is from Hal Varian, on the topic of “sexist pricing.”
Why demean yourself. Give us $50k a year and you can study Economics. After four years you will begin to wonder about the things that your less privileged compatriots learn after 6 months in a part time job.
A story. Where I lived in Quebec was remarkable for how well people dressed in public. Saturday morning shopping was like a fashion show. My women friends were able to dress far better than they could afford by buying very nice clothes at the start of the new season when the last year’s fashions were put on sale at very low prices. It helped to be a bit smaller or larger than the mean.
Put another way:
Marketing and Advertising tend to reflect fictions not truths.
Prices tend to reflect truths not fictions.
For counter-intuitive price differences,
find a way for human behavior to explain why a given price is true.
(This is operationalism, or what we call incentives.)
Women display higher sensitivity when selecting purchases.
There are evolutionary reasons for women doing so.
Men display lower sensitivity when selecting purchases .
There are evolutionary reasons for men to do so.
In all products that cater to women companies require greater variation in product lines.
Fashion in particular.
And in all product lines companies experience greater losses.
Ergo, women’s products are more price-perishable.
The fact that it’s difficult to sell to women, yet women dispose of most income, creates a lottery effect.
Much of this lottery effect encourages entry into the market for women’s products.
Women benefit from this lottery, both in discounts on goods and on greater variety of goods.
Suiting their greater discretion.
So, do high end stereos and high end cars go out of fashion or not? After all, one economist noted these as examples of the sort of item that are expensive, whose marketing is directed towards men. ‘Clearance sale’ might not be the right word, but who pays full price for last year’s models?
Pricing is used in any number of ways – maybe a diligent search can find research concerning whether loss leaders also show patterns of price discrimination, and of what variety. And then one can have fun deciding what is a ‘loss leader’ – for example, the BMW i3 and i8 are thought to be sold at a loss (at least according to various German automotive press reporting), even though the i8 is clearly a high end sport model. One pretty clearly targetted at men, especially compared to a model more likely to be used by women, such as a BMW 3 series station wagon, which generates a tidy profit.
Women are taught to be consumers. They buy way more than they need.