First, as an economist, I would argue that seniors should get discounts for reasons other than just “this is traditionally how it’s been done.” Today’s seniors are the wealthiest in the history of the world. Do they still deserve them? Auto workers used to get great pension packages, but now they don’t. Things change. The average 70-year old has a higher standard of living than the average 21-year old; shouldn’t we give 21-year olds discounts instead? (Rhetorical question, of course)

I think you can definitely make a case that cutting a woman’s hair is often more time-consuming than cutting a man’s. When my girlfriend goes to the salon, she’s there for 3 hours. I’m there for 15 minutes. Sure, she’s getting highlights too, but that doesn’t take 2.75 hours. And of course, there are some women who take more time than others — just as there are some men with simple hair and others with more complicated hair. But if salon owners had to charge by the minute, it might be too cumbersome a policy to administer, and people wouldn’t want the chit-chat with their hairdresser. You could argue it would decrease the overall quality of the experience, so it’s just easier to put people in groups based on how long it takes on average to cut their hair, and the easiest such division is men/women.

But even if I stipulate to your assertion that it’s not all based on women taking more time or effort, and they simply charge women more because they can, my response is this: morally it’s wrong, but economically it’s justifiable. You charge people what they’ll pay. If those differences happen to be based on gender, then so be it. If salons had to charge the same price, they’d very likely charge a higher price to men (because there’s much more money made on women than men) and a lot of men would not get their hair cut professionally, or not as often. Do you really want unkempt men roaming the streets? (Another rhetorical question; I like asking them.)

In my Managerial Economics class, I point out that while it might be illegal to charge different prices to different people for the same good or service, based on gender, it can still be done. You can offer your customers two different packages, one that men tend to buy and one that women tend to buy. And you can paint one package pink and the other blue. And even though anyone can buy either package, essentially you’ll have women buying the pink package and men buying the blue one. And you can charge a higher price for the pink one than the blue one (and as a business, probably should if you have reason to believe women will pay more than men). Whether that’s morally wrong depends on your morals, and those vary across people.

The whole purpose of this post was to draw attention to the inherent conflict between morality and economics. Your questions highlights that conflict nicely.

But what about price discrimination in hair salons and dry cleaners, involving lower prices offered to men vs. women? In many hair salons, a wash, cut, and blow-dry for a man costs half or close to half what it costs for a woman, even if the labor involved is the same or similar. If you ask hairdressers why they do this, they hem and haw — “Oh, women’s hair is so much harder to cut” — but when you show that this is not the case, they will admit that they charge women more because they think women will pay more (because they supposedly care more about their hair) and that men will not.

What is your response to this issue?

Not all price discrimination is based on income, where people with higher incomes pay higher prices. At my school, they sell Microsoft Office at two different prices to students and faculty: $68 for students and $11 for faculty. Obviously faculty have more income, but they give us this low price because we already have free copies on our computers at work, so we don’t really need an extra copy as much as students might need a first copy to have on their computers at home. The example of charging different prices to women and men for “Ladies’ Night” is not based on income either — it’s based on the fact that more men typically go to bars, so these bars need to find some extra inducement to get women to go.

Please re-read everything I said about senior citizens and movies and you’ll see that I never made an income-based argument for it. Maybe seniors don’t like the loud noise. Maybe they hate teenagers, and that’s where teenagers hang out. The bottom line is it doesn’t matter why theaters are giving them a discount. The fact that they are getting a lower price does not mean that non-seniors are paying higher movie ticket prices. THAT was my main point, which I emphasized in the conclusion to the post.

But just for the sake of argument…suppose I had said it was based on income. Your argument seems to be that it’s not fair that seniors get to “have their cake and eat it too.” But even if that’s true, how are non-seniors any worse off as a result? Answer: they aren’t. They are paying the same movie ticket prices they would pay even if grandma didn’t get a discount. They might be annoyed and jealous, but they’re no worse off. (The seniors aren’t eating any of the non-seniors’ cake, as you imply; life is not always a zero-sum game.) And some day, the younger group will be seniors and they’ll get the same benefit.

Your statement that seniors are “unfairly enriched” is at the heart of your comment. But it is not a fact. It is a presumption — it presumes that if seniors did not get discounts, everyone else would pay lower prices. That is PRECISELY why I wrote this post: to show, using data and a little analysis, that just because one group of people (seniors) is better off when price discrimination is allowed does not mean that if price discrimination were not allowed, the other group (non-seniors) would be better off. It was designed to show that not all price discrimination is “bad” or “unfair” if you look at the outcome and compare it to what the outcome would be if firms could not price discriminate.

You may think seniors are unjustly enriched, and you can think that based on philosophy or morality or ethics. That goes to your idea of justice. If you want to look at it from a moral or ethical perspective, that’s fine — and hopefully you can see in the comments between Benjamin and myself that I understand the tension there and acknowledge that I myself sometimes have difficulty weighing the moral part of this against the economic part of this. But the key to my whole argument is that non-seniors are paying the same prices whether or not grandma gets a discount. If non-seniors were paying higher prices, your claim would be more credible. Then, in fact, non-seniors would actually be worse off, and I might agree with your use of the word “unfairly.” But the data seems to show that would not be the case.

I guess I have a hard time answering your question with a one-word answer because I think that, regardless of the legality or the economic justification for it, it is morally wrong to treat people of different races differently — whether that’s favoring a race because you like them or punishing a race because you don’t. So there’s a tension there for me, and I’m not always ruled by economics…