Comment by fguerraz
2 days ago
I would argue that the main reason is because everything is about money, and the shorter marketability of everything. Colors are polarising, and affect the unsold inventory and perceived resale value.
Why manufacture objects in 10 different colours if you know the green one is going to be a tough sell? Why buy a blue car if you think you’re going to sell it back after 2 years and struggle to do so?
You don’t want things you don’t intend to keep to have personally, period.
A long time ago I worked at a children's toy store and among other things I was responsible for ordering and restocking the bins full of small loose toys that cost under a buck or two.
A weird thing I noticed was that if an item came in an assortment of colors that included yellow, yellow was always the slowest color to sell. Often bins would end up with just yellow inventory after all the other colors had sold. But I discovered that if I removed the yellow samples from the bin entirely that the overall sales for the item would plummet.
I'd often joke that we should open up another store that only sold yellow merchandise as a way to move the excess inventory that built up from me implementing a yellow-buffering system, but instead we'd just end up donating them to a school or giving them away on Easter or whatever.
awesome insight. i've heard this referred to as the "site merchandising" problem. There are some products that are there to attract people / give them a choice, but they don't sell themselves.
Reminiscent of halo cars in the automotive industry. Fancy flagship vehicles produced to show off the brand and bring attention (to their other vehicles), but not necessarily to become profit makers themselves.
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Cafes use it too. E.g. a corner coffee shop may stock pastries that nobody buys. When people walk in "wow look at all their pastries!" And they feel good and become regulars.
I heard plasma tvs did exactly that for beard trimmers or whatever.
In fact, there is demand for colorful products. However, the way businesses measure demand today is through the aggregate unit demand. In effect, you get the lowest common denominator products rising to the top, and people with specific preferences can't get at their desired products. If instead, businesses would measure demand at a more granular level, they'd see this and be able to better serve their customers.
my startup varietyiq is working towards helping apparel businesses do this / have seen it work very well.
I think it goes one layer further, everyone is worried that everyone else is worried that colors don't sell. "I like this used bright pink Honda, but I'm worried no one else will buy it if I want to sell so I'm not going to buy it"
Like it's a perceptual disease where there's a difference between real preferences and perceived preferences and people are making decisions based on their wrong assumptions about everyone else, and when everyone is doing it it becomes true even though we're collectively all making less optimal choices.
Cars are not buy it for life items. I generally buy a 3 year old car because it is about half the price of a new one - but I'm limited to what color I can find. If I bought new cars I could get whatever color - except that new car buyers won't be seen in a 4 year old car, and they can only afford to upgrade (to the extent they can) if the car has resale value so they care about what color they (the dealer) thinks will sell.
When we bought our current house it was perfect except the colors were an awful neutral grey - I had a hard time convincing my wife despite the otherwise perfection, and only did because we spent several thousand dollars getting it repainted before we moved in. I'm sure the sellers realtor thought the neutral colors were a great idea, but they almost cost several thousand dollars (there was a bidding war when we bought the house, we almost didn't bid and so the sellers would have lost).
The important point is if you like color make sure you pay for it, and reject things if they don't have the color you want.
> Cars are not buy it for life items.
No, but they certainly can be "buy it for the life of the car". I prefer that myself. New cars are nice, but I'm not going to trade up to a new car every few years. I will buy new (or new-ish), and then drive it until it dies 15 years later. Much more cost effective.
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>If I bought new cars I could get whatever color
You can get a black one, a white one, a grey one, or then maybe two or three others that are most often in a red/green/blue/green which is really more of a flavored grey or black. Currently the Toyota Camry, really the only paint you can get where I'd (in a perhaps slightly silly restrictive way) would call "a color" is red. The other 11 options are either greyscale or slightly tinted greyscale.
Yup. I think it’s terrible the author brought up adolf loos, an architect from the early 1900s, showed a building I don’t think he made, and then blamed him for dull modern apartment buildings. If you look up his buildings, they’re actually pretty cool and weird; he was an artist responding to his time. Modern apartment buildings are developed by people with inordinate wealth who don’t care about the asthetic beauty surrounding those peons who pay them rent. The priority is beauty that impresses on the first viewing to trick renters. Every other incentive is to save money, and art is one of the first things to go when people start trying to be perfectly efficient. That’s the same sort of issue with music, desperation that precludes a focus on pure art.
base neutral colors sell well, exotic colors sell in small amounts => they die out due to small scale/being niche
I think this is really the reason. Companies also save money by not making things in a variety of colors.