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NancyLebovitz comments on Financial incentives don't get rid of bias? Prize for best answer. - Less Wrong
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Here's an example where large potential incentives have failed to override bias-- I think it's an example of what you're looking for.
Good clothing for fat women has very limited availability.
You might think that the unending publicity about people getting fatter combined with a modest amount of observation that people like dressing well would lead to the conclusion that there are a lot of people who'd pay plenty, but it doesn't seem to register.
Or were you looking for explicit incentives which don't require effort to notice?
A different case of incentives failing to work: People haven't gotten better at avoiding market bubbles.
What I want to know is why no one sells half-bras. There's a market: most women are at least somewhat asymmetrical, plenty by enough to warrant different cup sizes. It wouldn't be revolutionary bra technology: it would just have to fasten in the front and the back both and be packaged individually. And it wouldn't take up much extra store space to stock the same range of sizes. I looked once, and there's a patent on it, but no one seems to actually manufacture the things.
There's an even more compelling market: women who have had a single mastectomy. I'd be surprised if there weren't medical half-bras out there already for them.
It wouldn't surprise me. It's cosmetically expected that asymmetries like that be corrected for the visual benefit of others (and for the purpose of making clothes fit) with fills or some other sort of padding. That's also the suggestion I've tended to get when I've expressed a wish for half-bras.
You're right, I should've thought of that. I expect it's easier (maybe therefore cheaper?) to manufacture little silicone blobs or whatever than a half-bra, which must partly be why there's a market for the first and not the second.
It wouldn't be hard to manufacture a half-bra. They already have bras that clasp in front and ones that clasp in the back; there is no obvious structural reason why they couldn't make one that does both and then sell the parts separately. In fact, based on the sorts of bras that already exist, it wouldn't be that hard to have a bunch of bins of detached bra parts that could be assembled in any fashion desired. There are bras with detachable straps, too, so there's clearly no structural reason they have to be permanently affixed and therefore no reason they couldn't be swapped out consumer-side for preferred versions. Most women wear bras that do not fit because there are so many things that need to be right and custom-made ones run into the hundreds of dollars. But it seems an obvious market failure that I can't go into a store, pick out a left cup and a right cup and the straps of my choice, and walk out with something that will work better for me than anything I could find in Target without significant extra expense.
Most people have different sized feet and shoes are already separate yet shoes are sold in pairs of matching sizes. I suspect that if you can figure out why that is you will also gain insight into the bra question.
I'm pretty sure that at some point in my childhood I needed mismatched shoe sizes, possibly by as much as a full size — and was able to get them.
OTOH, look at the signaling implications of such a purchase. There's a big difference between knowing you're asymmetrical, and going and buying special clothing because of it. Sure, some people will buy it, but it seems unlikely to achieve mass acceptance.
Having thought about it a little longer and updated based on your evidently broader knowledge of bras, my original guess for why the market failure exists does seem pretty unlikely.
To the extent that 'good' equals 'fashionable' for clothing I suspect this is a harder problem than it initially seems. What is fashionable is largely defined by what trend setting / fashionable people are currently wearing and the set of trend setting / fashionable women is almost entirely disjoint from the set of fat women. Therefore styles and cuts that are designed to flatter fat women will never become fashionable and fashionable clothing will not scale up well to body shapes it was not designed for.
If you actually wanted to address this issue you'd have to make fat women into trend setters which is a much harder problem than simply scaling up fashionable clothing. The market need you have identified is largely targeted by the dieting and weight loss industries which are very large and profitable.
In this context, "good" means durable, pleasant-looking, and not unfashionable.
From what I've seen of the clothes that fat women are enthusiastic about, they tend to be somewhat simpler and more classic looking than the mainstream. I don't know whether this is making the best of what's available, or whether most thin women would prefer that sort of thing if they could get it.
Or maybe my perceptions of the difference are off. I'm actually not that interested in clothes.
It may be a bit more complicated than just bias vs. financial incentive. Just because you want to provide plus-size clothing, doesn't mean you have any idea how to design for the market, or that it's actually profitable for a given store to try to reach the plus-size market. (Among the problems: what parts of a person are "plus-sized" can vary considerably!)
The manufacturers my wife buys from for her lingerie store's inventory generally have some sort of plus sizes, but it's hard for her to carry enough variety of things that would actually "work" for a wide enough variety of women to offset the carrying cost in floor space and inventory investment. As a plus-sized woman herself, my wife found this annoying, but as a businesswoman, she shrank the selection to reflect the financial reality of the matter.
(Another local lingerie store, one that actually chose to focus its entire inventory and marketing on plus-sized women, went belly-up in relatively short order, though of course most new businesses do.)
It's certainly true that it would take a good bit of capital and knowledge to do a significant job of supplying plus size clothing which is as fashionable and well made as the what's now available for thinner women, but it's a little surprising that no one's managed it. I was thinking more about manufacturers than retailers-- retailers can't sell what doesn't exist.
Your wife's problem does reflect a hard constraint-- fat women will have all the variation in skeletal proportions and muscle that thin and medium build women do plus a lot of variation in fat distribution.
If you check back at the link in my previous post, there's one fat woman who says things have gotten better, in contrast to several others who say it's mostly worse.
The link is broken, I'm afraid - try this one;
http://nancylebov.livejournal.com/423572.html
Thanks. I've corrected it.
I think that the reason that people don't sell good clothing for fat women is the intersection of existing manufacturers not wanting to sell clothing for fat women, because doing so would lower their status, and fat women don't want to buy good clothing from exclusively for fat women retailers, because doing so would lower their status. I wish I could see a way to take advantage of this market opportunity. Does anyone have any ideas?
Status is part of it, but there's a perfectly good statistical explanation too.
There is much higher variance among fat people than among thin people. It's the long tail of the distribution. So plus sizes are much more approximate. It's more likely that the clothes won't fit. This also makes the return on each additional size lower -- there may be a lot of plus-size women generally, but they're spread out enough that there aren't a lot of size 16s specifically.
I don't think that accounts for everything, but it is part of it.
You're already seeing more good plus-size fashion, I think, of necessity. It's coming.
Maybe it would make sense to sell clothes that are very easy to "let out" at home. I could imagine, for instance, a skirt that you could add extra pleating to with snaps or buttons inside the waistband. You could put it on the rack with all the buttons done, so the customer doesn't need to be seen shopping in a "fat section" and the exact same style would be of a type open to thin women, and it could triple in possible size if you undid them all without needing to be made of an unflattering stretchy fabric. If one needed to undo some but not all of the pleats, the choice of which to undo would be a nifty bit of extra customization.
Man, now I want a skirt like that. Or four.
Please post about how the skirt works out. I think the additional fabric will bunch up when the skirt is in its smaller mode, but I could be mistaken.
I have a skirt with a lot of fabric in it that gathers up at an (elastic) waist. I imagine my idea would wind up working much the same way. It looks fine and it's comfortable and twirly! I do think it would be important to make the button-waist skirt out of a thin, ideally woven fabric.
Maybe. I still think the fact that it was in any way designed for fat people, even if usable by thin people, would cause the status concerns. Also, clothing that you (assuming you don't have crazy seamstressing skills) modify tend not to be "good" clothing which was what the OP was about.
I find myself tempted to sell the idea just because I personally really want a skirt like this. That probably means that I should sell it to my mom, as opposed to Less Wrong, because she might sew me one without needing to think it's an entrepreneurial bonanza. But I think people besides me might buy them!
I think that people will buy them, just not enough to get them into stores. Online distribution allows for small volume manufacturing.
I just e-mailed my mom. If I can get her to make me one and it's as awesome as I think it is, then there will exist a pattern and a prototype.
I think the level of prejudice is so high that you'd need a good bit of money and a lot of dedication to do it on the large scale. I keep thinking it would take ten million dollars to start a mass production clothing company, but this is only a guess. Does anyone here have a well-founded estimate?
As for the smaller scale, here's some of what's going on. If you're not up for starting the big company, you might find a small business which is worth investing in.
How sure are you that fat women won't shop at a places that offer good clothing only for fat women? My first thought was that your theory is nonsense, but then I realized I'd been reading fat acceptance material for so long that I don't really know.
Maybe it's just that the hypothetical business would need to advertise.
Those websites have some pretty things. (Including items I wouldn't expect to be marketed to any size in particular - really, scarves?) I wonder how large-scale a movement towards the availability of pretty clothes for plus sizes would need to be before large, pretty clothes started reliably being available in thrift stores? (I have been spoiled by $3 garments and wince whenever I look at retail prices -.-)