Black Barbie: Why So Cheap?

It seems as though there were two Barbies: Ballerina Barbie and Ballerina Theresa.  Ballerina Barbie wore pink while Ballerina Theresa wore aquamarine.  Both ballerinas had the same hairstyle and looked the same with one key difference: Barbie was white and Theresa was black.  When the Theresa doll didn’t sell in as great of numbers as the Barbie doll did, Walmart cut the price from $5.93 to $3.00.  You can image what happened next!

Whatever Ballerina Thesesa’s lagging sales may say about society, retail analyst Lori Wachs said Walmart may ultimately regret their pricing choice. The discount giant, which reported a quarterly profit of $4.7 billion last month, could have absorbed whatever loss it might have suffered had it kept Ballerina Theresa’s price the same as that of Ballerina Barbie.

This story reminds me of what happens when scientists get together and decide to “study” a situation to learn why it is occurring.  They collect their data, they write it all down, they do their calculations and – voila – they have their result.  Don’t like the result?  Oh, that’s okay… just modify the formula until you get the right result.

• Now mankind is responsible for global warming.
• More gun sales mean more violence.
• Keeping people on unemployment longer lowers the unemployment rate.
• Discrimination against one type of person to reward a different type of person is okay because of what happened 100 years ago.

It seems that some people think Walmart’s decision to mark Black Barbie’s price down by nearly 50% “sends the wrong message.”

“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.

It could be the Black Barbie doesn’t look “black enough” for parents to buy it for their children:

Black parents, she said, may simply choose black dolls whose physical features hew more closely to those of themselves and their children. Barbie has weathered criticism in the past for producing dolls that bear little resemblance to the ethnicities they represent.

If could be more whites than blacks shop at that local Walmart, or that white parents have more money to spend on toys than black parents do or that black parents spend their money on other types of toys besides dolls.  The point is, nobody really knows why one color doll sells better than the other color but to suggest Walmart should eat the loss just to keep a positive image in people’s heads is absurd – they are only reacting to the marketplace.

Should we simply ignore the sales disparity, price both the same, and turn a blind eye to the situation?  Would it not be better to discuss why the Black Barbie sells in fewer numbers than to pretend there is no difference?  How does that help anybody?

Unfortunately, many images are pushed in our society.  Even though a majority of American women have no hope of ever being as thin as the fashion models we see, plus-sized models are still not very common.  Most recently during the Olympic games we saw ads for McDonald’s showing many famous athletes eating there even though I’m sure the Big Mac won’t help your downhill slalom times.

What message do you think these photos send to women:

The photos above reference a rubber band that pushes a woman’s breasts up to make them appear larger.  Of course, the woman with the “larger” breasts is smiling and happy while the other one is not.

In the harsh world of marketing and economics, the truth is often in the numbers, even if people don’t want to see it.