Justin Wolfers writes in Freakonomics about the abundance of big clothing in stores. He’s right. Look through the sales racks at a clothing store and you’re in luck of you’re a really big guy. Erik Snowberg brought up the question to Wolfers and he said the obvious answer doesn’t quite work.

There are more “normal” size people than those on the extremes, so of course medium and large sell faster. But as Snowberg points out, of course clothing buyers know this so and they would simply order more in the middle if that’s all there is to it. Here’s his conclusion:

My best guess is that for some reason small and large people are, in general, less willing to pay for clothes. Maybe because they are outside of the norms for physical beauty, they believe that sharp clothes won’t help them that much.

Whatever the reason, a clothing store can’t set lower prices for different sizes, so it price discriminates by waiting a little bit and putting remaining stock on sale — which happens to be (surprise!) in the large and sometimes small sizes.

The post has drawn a lot of comments here.