Lady Gaga Snerd wrote:

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Soooo, buy the men's version?

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Yes, please do this.

The guiding principle in setting prices is "What The Market Will Bear".  The higher prices will only go down if people refuse to pay extra.

Lawyerlady wrote:

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My biggest irritant is button down shirts at the dry cleaners. They charge women 4 times as much because the buttons are on the other side.

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Have you tried wearing men's shirts? Maybe telling the laundry that they're your son's shirts? 

Or suing them for sex discrimination?

Lawyerlady wrote:

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ed11563 wrote:

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Lawyerlady wrote:

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My biggest irritant is button down shirts at the dry cleaners. They charge women 4 times as much because the buttons are on the other side.

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Have you tried wearing men's shirts? Maybe telling the laundry that they're your son's shirts? 

Or suing them for sex discrimination?

 

-- Edited by ed11563 on Wednesday 23rd of December 2015 09:15:48 AM

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 Women's shirts are made with the buttons on the opposite side, so you can't fool them into thinking they are men's shirts. 

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Be assertive, tell them if they want your business, they'll charge you the men's rate. (Everything is negotiable.) 

Or, sue the bastards. (not really kidding.)

Let’s start with men’s shirts: buttons on the right placket, the open flap on the left. The most common explanation comes from the fact that clothing, for wealthy men, often included weaponry. Since most men held swords in their right hands, this Quora thread explains, “it was more convenient and quicker to use their left hand for unbuttoning.” You can see evidence of that in portraiture. All those hand-in-waistcoat pictures popular in the 19th century? They involve, generally, the slipping of hand into an open area of the coat, right-to-left.

You could also see the right-button orientation as a holdover from warfare more directly. “To insure that an enemy's lance point would not slip between the plates,” curators write in The Art of Chivalry: European Arms and Armor from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “they overlapped from left to right, since it was standard fighting practice that the left side, protected by the shield, was turned toward the enemy. Thus, men's jackets button left to right even to the present day.”

he pull a weapon from left to right. Fastening a garment from right to left would impede the movement of our ancestors.” Or, as the menswear-loving comedian Paula Poundstone noted, jokingly taking on the button differential in Salon: “Some costumers speculate that at one time, both men and women held animal skins over themselves with their left hand, making a right-over-left closure, in order to free up their right hand for more important tasks, such as signing their Discover card receipt at the belt store.”

Okay. So that (mostly) explains why men’s buttons are on the right. But then, why are women’s on the left?

One theory: babies. Given right-hand dominance, women tend to hold their infants in their left arms, keeping their right arms relatively free. So shirts whose open flap is on the right, one theory goes, makes it easier for them to open with those free hands for breastfeeding.

Another theory: horses. Women, to the extent women rode horses, rode sidesaddle, to the right—so putting their shirt and dress buttons on the left reduced, to some extent, the breeze that would flow into their shirts as they were trotting along.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/the-curious-case-of-men-and-womens-buttons/388844/