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Interesting story linked to from Drudge:Black Barbie Sold for Less Than White Barbie at Walmart StoreIn short, pictures were posted on a website that were taken inside a Walmart, where a black and a white version of the same barbie doll were being sold - but at two different prices. The black barbie was marked down to $3 and the white barbie remained at regular price of $5.93. The story was trying to move certain inventory and so did the markdown, but that's not the way some people took it:
"The implication of the lowering of the price is that's devaluing the black doll," said Thelma Dye, the executive director of the Northside Center for Child Development, a Harlem, N.Y. organization founded by pioneering psychologists and segregation researchers Kenneth B. Clark and Marnie Phipps Clark....Other experts agree. Walmart could have decided "that it's really important that we as a company don't send a message that we value blackness less than whiteness," said Lisa Wade, an assistant sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the founder of the blog Sociological Images.
Herein lies the problem: the free market doesn't care about political correctness. The pricing going on is a function of consumer demand, and they're really not going to change that demand by manipulating pricing for the benefit of some "message". If Walmart were forced to sell both dolls at the same price, the result would be that the store would have excess inventory on its hands that it would not be able to sell. More families would therefore buy the white barbie in their homes and fewer families would own the black barbies. Once again, politically correct social engineering would fail.
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