Comment by a_e_k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a_e_k | Hacker News Reader

This seems like it would be well explained by Hotelling's Law [0], which has been discussed here on HN before [1][2]. Harold Hotelling called this (rather on the nose, in fact) back in 1929 [3]:

> The tremendous standardisation of our furniture, our houses, our clothing, our automobiles and our education are due in part to the economies of large-scale production, in part to fashion and imitation. But over and above these forces is the effect we have been discussing, the tendency to make only slight deviations in order to have for the new commodity as many buyers of the old as possible, to get, so to speak, between one's competitors and a mass of customers.

Certainly, grey tends to be the most neutral between the colors and therefore it seems reasonable that products would gravitate towards it (as according to Hotelling's Law) to try to capture as much of the possible of the market.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10787515

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17166934

[3]: https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2224214

> grey tends to be the most neutral between the colors and therefore it seems reasonable that products would gravitate towards it

This argument would convince me if it were not technically so easy nowadays to offer most products in a variety of colours. Especially for large-scale production the cost of offering some variety in colour should be marginal. So instead of just going "grey", why not offer a palette of colours to try to capture as much of possible of the market?

Where I see the dominance of grey most clearly is modern buildings, from single residential right through to large commercial. In those cases the owners want to appeal to as many buyers as possible but don't have a large number to offer (usually just a single building). Unfortunately grey makes some sense in that case. I think it really started to become ubiquitous as housing came to be seen more as an investment (why paint something in a colour you like if it means it will be harder to get a good price on the market?)

> Especially for large-scale production the cost of offering some variety in colour should be marginal.

No?

You need to overproduce more items that might not get sold, you need more floor space to have all the variants on offer all the time. It's less efficient than a single variant. Whether that's "marginal" depends on the product. It's not like everything is gray.

But what about cars? Many of them are only built after they have been ordered. Nevertheless, we also have the trend towards black, white and grey here. At a classic car meeting, on the other hand, you see so many different, often much more appealing colours and combinations. Why was it so different in the past?

Most people also consider the need to sell the car down the line. Choosing the colour that maximizes your chances (or at least copying what every one else dose in the hope that it helps).

It wasn't. Classic cars are a biased set. Interesting ones have been kept and boring ones are not.

I'd also wager that most classic cars you see around these days have been repainted. When the cost to repaint is roughly the same why not go for an interesting color over gray or white?

One more relevant discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24742253

Post-war mass production was many decades old by the 1970's when Orange and Yellow were the dominant colors, and everything in our lives (cars, furniture, buildings, appliances, etc.) was vastly more colorful.

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