How Common Are Women's Shirts?

One of the standard examples of?price discrimination is the typical price difference between the cost of cleaning men’s shirts and women’s shirts/blouses (higher prices on the latter).? This picture from a cleaners in suburban Philadelphia suggests one reason why the price difference might be?cost-based-the cleaners has no machines to do the typically smaller women’s shirts and must have them hand-finished, which is much more costly.? Surely, though, women’s smaller shirts are not so uncommon that it wouldn’t pay for a local cleaning outlet to have the necessary machinery.? Even if the scale in one outlet were insufficient to make purchasing such a machine profitable, wouldn’t larger cleaners or groups of local outlets be able to clean women’s shirts centrally?? While superficially appealing, the cleaners’ apology for the price difference does not seem satisfactory once one thinks about the market just a shade more deeply.