divvyry

“The Pink Tax” is a term of ignorance used by people who seem to observe that products with pink packaging or otherwise feminine themed packaging, are charged a higher price than essentially the identical item but packaged in a more masculine way.

Here is one example of someone complaining about it, who doesn’t realize how it works:

(incredulous tone) “Companies put higher price tags on products marketed to women, simply because we are women.”

No dear; allow me to economics-splain.

Let’s say you have a single product, and want to sell a bajillion of them. Different kinds of packaging will sell differently as a matter of observation; if you sold the same product, separately, yellow packages and purple packages, even if the yellow version outsells purple, you’re still making the purple number of sales above what you would have made by only selling the yellow, assuming there are no shortages where people had no choice but to buy the yellow if purple ran out.

Let’s say you’ve tried most of the colors and some seem to sell okay, but more specifically, pink and blue sell far and above the best of any of the others, so you focus all your efforts on those two. Keep in mind you’re not even bothering with marketing to male or female yet, you’re just experimenting with colored packaging.

If you’re a maker of this product, chances are you don’t really have a lot of ground for insisting that your product sell for a very specific price. In many situations you just get lots of orders from a big retailer demanding a large volume of your product for x price, and you focus on cranking those out.

If you’re a retailer, for the most part you get to choose what you sell something for. You pay the maker a big sum for a zillion of them, and it’s up to you whether you want to sell it for $0.05 more than you paid for it, or $5.00 more than you paid for it.

Now, there is a team of sales analysts that will raise and lower the shelf price of the items in their store, by cents at a time, to gauge whether shoppers will stop buying them if the price gets too high, or will buy them more frequently if the price only goes down just a little.

They have a zillion of this one kind of item, so they’re still making a profit off whatever price they set it at, but are constantly analyzing whether they can make more profit by doing certain things to the price, such as by having sales so people will come to their store to check out the new price and hopefully buy something else too.

They can also market a “new lower price” when it is reduced from a price they had raised it up to, when erroneously testing whether anyone will buy it that high, but realized “oops, that was too high” and drop it back down again to try to bring shoppers back.

Now imagine that, for whatever reason, the pink version of the same product still sells consistently as the price rises, but the blue version of the same product loses sales when the price rises by only a little.

This isn’t a tax, it’s just a normal market observation. It’s not because you’re a woman; it’s because you personally insist on paying more for the same item because of the packaging, rather than just buying the cheaper blue version.

If men bought the pink version, there wouldn’t be really any way to tell whether they did — the analysis is essentially on the hard sales figures, regardless of who buys it.

The retailer doesn’t really care if you’re actually a woman buying the razor or whatever, and therefore trying to tax “you” for buying it “because you’re a woman” but rather that, very simply, whoever keeps buying the pink ones, will still buy the pink ones even if the price goes up.

If the pink version will keep selling for higher, then the pink version’s price will stay high. If the blue version won’t sell for higher when it is raised, then the price will go back down, or may become discontinued to be replaced by something else that might sell better like how the other colors were also eliminated.

A lot of people will have “their brand” they always get regardless of the price to make shopping simpler, and may never waver from it unless the product itself changes too drastically.

As for the male/female aspect, there’s not really a motive necessarily to intentionally sell to specifically women or men — they just want higher sales figures regardless of who buys it. If women buy the pink one at a higher price, great. If it’s men who are buying it at a higher price, great.

Regardless, whoever keeps buying the pink one, will be willing to pay the higher price just because it is pink and offers no other additional features than the blue one.

If there is a feminine hygiene product, they may try to market the identical pad/etc to “sporty” women or to more casual/feminine women, even though the pads/etc are identical. They aren’t creating a “sports” tax or raising the price “just for being a sporty woman”; they’re just increasing sales of the same item based on variations of packaging that seem to sell regardless of how much they jack the price for, within certain tolerances.

Same goes for multi-packs of something. You may see a shelf price of $4 for a 2-pack, and $3 for a 1-pack, or $4 for a 1-pack and $3 for a 2-pack.

If the very idea that you’re “saving” more by buying one or the other, or that the company is “losing” more, gets you to buy the thing that they’re originally only paying $0.50 for, they’re still making a large profit off either kind, and can raise the price of the differing packs as if they were their own unique items, to see whether specifically 2-packs sell better or worse if lowered, independently, of whether 1-packs sell better or worse if lowered, independently of the pack-size.

Let’s say you’re a retailer and have 100 different products, and some of them are duplicate items just with different packaging, and you raise the price by a nickel on everything. You may observe that 75 items will still sell well, while the other 25 dropped in sales, so you put the 25 back to their lower price and can now advertise a “new lower price” on the those 25. You’d still be making a profit on all 100, even at the lower price, but you could be making more profit by bumping up the price more on the 75.

Out of those 75 items, you find that bumping the price up $0.15 reveals only 30 still consistently sell, so putting the other 45 back down to the +0.05 price (with a “new lower price” ad, even tho it’s technically still higher than the original 100 price) will resume your previous sales figures.

Now, out of those 30, you bump up $0.40 and 16 still sell really well, but the other 14 need to be reduced back to the +$0.20 (0.05+0.15) price. You’re not “taxing” people $0.40 just for buying whatever those items are, but just experimenting to see whether they will-or-won’t sell just from raw numbers.

You could even drop the price back down to the original 100 low price for a week, and get an influx of customers seeing the larger price difference (all while you still make a profit off the original 100 price), and that influx will possibly buy several other things while they are on site, and therefore increase sales of your other things.

You might even notice that since certain items at a reduced price will increase sales of other similar things, such as toilet paper when there is a sale on plungers, and you can voluntarily sell one thing at below the amount you paid for it and essentially lose money from its sale, if the increase of the sales of the other thing they bought with it at the higher price fills in the gap.

Long story short: There are easily a zillion things happening all at once to explain why any single product is priced higher or lower, and none of those reasons are “because you’re a (people group).”

Simply take any song you can think of with the following words in the title, and replace with a Star Wars word similar:

Baby / Boba, Obi
Moon / That’s No Moon
Dark / Darth
Woke, Walk(-ing), Talk-, Rock- / Ewok(ing), Tarkin, Porkins, (sky)Walk
Look / Luke
Lay A / Leia
F***ing / Falcon
Smoke / Snoke
Land (of) / Lando
You Back / Chewbacca
B***h / Sith
Hot / Hoth, Hutt
Enter / Endor
Tattoo, Taboo / Tatooine
Heart / Darth
Boss / Bossk
Fat / Fett
All / Maul
Gay, Ray, Hey, Lay, etc / Rey

Examples/Others —
Get Your Kicks on Order 66
Take that Luke off your face
I Wanna Hold Your Han
Darth Side of the Moon
Dark Side of the.. that’s no Moon
Blue.. that’s no Moon
Fly me to the.. that’s no Moon
That’s no Moon River
Ewokking on Sunshine
Ewok Around the Clock
Endor of the World As We Know It
Boba, It’s Cold Outside
Live and Jedi
Obi Wan More Time
Pretty Fly for a Jedi
Living La Vader Loca
Snoke on the Water
Ani Are you OK?
Kylo Silver Lining
Hit Me Up Before You Jar-Jar
Bespin Me Round (Like a record, Boba)
You’re The Obiwan That I want
Smack My Sith Up
Windu Beneath My (X-)wings
Endor Sandpeople
Hutt Lovin’
Do Wah Ditty, Ditty R Ditty 2
R2 Lonesome Tonight
These Boots Are Made For Porkins
Rock the Ackbar
Rock the Phasma
Anything by Darth Brooks
Anything by Cantina Turner
Wake Up Little Chewie
Fett Bottom Girls
Rock Me Amidala
Give Me Maul Your Lovin
Karma Kaminoan
Smooth Vader-vapor
Little Rey of Sunshine
Can you Feel the Force Tonight?
The Lion Siths Tonight
Maulroom Blitz
R-E-S-C-3-P-O
Janie’s Got a Gungan
Old Bendonald Had a Farm, E I 3 P O
Tarkin in the USSR
Anakin in the UK
R2D2 in the USA
Pink Bantha Theme
Luke Look Like a Lady
Never Give You Up Will I
YMCA-wing

The perceived need to point out that the crying Honduran girl wasn’t actually separated from her mother, to me is like trying to point out that a Ford Mustang isn’t actually a horse.

The Mustang is a symbol, a figurehead, an icon, that vaguely represents in the vehicle in a specific sense, but also not in other senses literal to the horse itself. The car, for instance, doesn’t consume oats, it doesn’t need its hair brushed, it doesn’t need to have shoes nailed to its hooves, it doesn’t defecate all over the street when walking down one. It doesn’t walk for that matter.

The specific detail of whether the crying child in the photograph was actually separated from her mother is completely beside the point. The child is symbolic of the helplessness, despite whether they child in particular, at that moment, was helpless. The image conveys the emotion many are feeling about the idea of children being separated, but is not, as far as I can find, being reported as one such child who actually was separated.

For some reason, there has been a surge of articles popping up about how the Honduran 2-year-old and her mother “weren’t actually separated,” and I’ve been trying to find a single article, however, that does actually claim they were separated.

There seems to be some kind of outrage that the “liberal media” could possibly portray the child as having been separated, despite not actually being separated.

But, “Which members of the ‘liberal media’ did so?” is my question.

Which sources did actually report that the two were separated, or is it possibly, that you who believe they did, merely pulled that idea out of thin air when viewing with eyes glazed over from among the numerous stories?

Did you somehow just associate the photo with other photos taken of detention centers, and make your own connection? Because if others had reported it as such, then sure, you would be able to cite some.

So cite some. I’ll wait right here.

What appears here, is a case of how several members of the public have gotten it into their heads that the girl actually was separated, yet no one is able to come up with any particular article which does so, and then blaming “the media” for this information the news consumers themselves pulled out of thin air.

Possibly the main source of the idea that the photograph “could be” misleading is the border patrol agent, Carlos Ruiz, who was the agent on duty alongside the photographer at the time:

“They’re using it to symbolize a policy and that was not the case in this picture,” Ruiz said. “It took less than two minutes. As soon as the search was finished, she immediately picked the girl up, and the girl immediately stopped crying.” –CBS News article, Crying girl in iconic image was never separated from mother, ICE says

My response to this, is that this is how basically all iconic images work.

When “Tank Man” stood in front of the tank in the famous photo, is it important whether that person was actually a citizen of China? It’s the image of the plight of a solitary person in the image, that makes it meaningful — irrespective of the finer details of whether the bags he was carrying contained fruit from the supermarket, or whether the person was even a man. In the video of that scene, the person climbs onto the tank and seemingly has a conversation with the tank operator, and they appear to speak to each other briefly at times.

What was their conversation? If the tank driver was just asking directions, would that matter? It’s the idea that a single person can stand in front of a column of tanks and halt them, that is powerful. Likewise, it is the idea of the crying child that is powerful, not the details of whether they were actually separated. Do you not know that children will cry over basically anything? Why she was actually crying is irrelevant — the photograph of the child crying, itself, irrespective of the details, is the power behind it, not the specifics.

The closest thing to anyone reporting that the kid was actually separated from her mother, that I can find so far, is that the photographer only mentioned that immigrants enduring this the asylum-approval process are separated, but he never actually stated these two in particular were separated.

A Honduran asylum seeker, 2, and her mother are taken into custody by federal agents near the US-Mexico border. They had just crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico and were to be transported to a US Customs and Border Protection processing center. The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy for undocumented immigrants calls for the separation of parents and children while their cases for political asylum are adjudicated, a process that can take months – or years. As a father myself, this photograph was especially difficult for me to take. It is one from a series i took while on a ride-along with the Border Patrol in Texas’ Río Grande Valley. #gettyimages #undocumented #gettyimagesnews

A post shared by John Moore (@jbmoorephoto) on Jun 13, 2018 at 10:48am PDT

In case the description of the photo is altered, as of June 22, 2018, it read, “A Honduran asylum seeker, 2, and her mother are taken into custody by federal agents near the US-Mexico border. They had just crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico and were to be transported to a US Customs and Border Protection processing center. The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy for undocumented immigrants calls for the separation of parents and children while their cases for political asylum are adjudicated, a process that can take months – or years. As a father myself, this photograph was especially difficult for me to take. It is one from a series i took while on a ride-along with the Border Patrol in Texas’ Río Grande Valley.”

It may be worth mentioning that the “zero tolerance” process described by the photographer (his post is dated June 13) was a concept thrown around before Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen spoke publicly dispelling several myths going around about their immigration policies on June 18, just below.

Perhaps even more alarming, that it is precisely the so-called ‘liberal media’ who is doing the reporting on the child not actually being separated. Pretty much all of the accusations being made against the liberal media of falsely reporting the child being separated, take their information from the CBS interview (here) of the border patrol agent dispelling those myths.

If you can provide any links to actual news articles stating that the child was separated from her mother, as a basis for which news articles would need to issue news alerts that the child “actually wasn’t” separated, please let me know. Or is it, that you can only find no-name bloggers (*cough*) accusing liberal media of doing so, without actually linking to the sources which do?