Hacker News Reader

Comment by Archelaos | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

View on HN

> 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?

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?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com