For Canadian women, that haircut may soon get cheaper

"For instance, clothes that can't fit on our automated machinery for pressing ... will have to be hand pressed [to avoid damaging them]," says Sandra Giarde, executive director of the California Cleaners Association in Sacramento. "You're talking two or three times the amount of time to finish that."

Most dry cleaners can't afford to replace old machinery geared toward men's garments with modern unisex machines that could handle smaller-size women's clothing, says Bobby Smerling, former president of Greater Los Angeles Dry Cleaners Association, in Santa Monica, Calif. "To change out the machinery, you're looking [at] about $10,000 for each [piece of] equipment, and an average dry cleaner has about three presses," he says.

Gender-based pricing is essentially a marketing tactic rather than sexism, says Bart Weitz, executive director of the University of Florida's Miller Center for Retailing Education and Research in Gainesville. "To be a profitable business, you'd want to charge people what they are willing to pay for something," Professor Weitz says. "Women might be willing to pay more [and] their preferences are different [from men's]."

Weitz is also concerned such a law could open the floodgates to costly lawsuits. "I think this [outlawing gender-based pricing] just increases the cost of doing business and eventually the prices charged consumers," he says.

But Jackson, the former California Assemblywoman, says the issue of discriminatory pricing is not overblown. She admits, however, that a decade after the law took effect, California is still having problems enforcing it. The state's consumer affairs department is understaffed and many businesses don't want to comply with the law, she says.

"Things aren't difficult to enforce if people know what their rights are," Jackson says. "People buy with their feet. If they don't like the way they're being treated, they go elsewhere. But they need to know that it's unlawful to do the kinds of things that are being done by these different companies."

Price discrimination occurs when identical goods or services are sold at different prices to different customers. For example, airlines charge different prices for seats on the same flight.

The US Federal Trade Commission says that, in general, this is lawful if it reflects higher costs in dealing with different buyers, or to boost competition. Here are the three kinds of price discrimination:

First degree: Price varies by customer when prices are negotiable, as in car sales, sports tickets, or real estate.

Second degree: Price varies by the number of units sold. In other words, if you buy a lot of something, the cost per unit generally goes down.

Third degree: Price varies by customer group. This can include charging higher rates to young male drivers for auto insurance or making women pay higher prices to dry clean certain garments that require special care. Some communities have banned instances of gender-based price discrimination. For example: discounts for women entering nightclubs.

Source: DigitalEconomist.com, FTC.gov.

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