It is well known fact that a lot of Americans who actually are registered voters don’t go out and vote on election days for various reasons, some which may include being busy on that particular day or being unable to find a polling location. Many efforts have been made to attempt to get more people at the polls this year on
A hairstylist and salon owner named Marc Floyd is using a creative method to encourage people to actually go out and cast their ballots on Election Day: he will offer to cut anyone’s hair for half the price he usually charges if that person presents to him an “I Voted” sticker. Floyd claims he got the idea of increasing the number of voters at the polls by giving an incentive to do so when he noticed that many of his patrons were concerned about the country, but too lazy to actually head over to the polls.
Despite the fact that his incentive will definitely get more people voting, Floyd's deal only applies to male voters. Floyd claims that his customers who are women were more enthusiastic than his male patrons about voting, which is his reason for not offering the same incentive to women.
First of all, I admire this man for attempting to get more people to vote on Election Day. Even if it won’t get a massive number of people to actually go out and cast their ballots, it will set an example other businesses could follow to encourage voters to be less apathetic about voting. However, I think it is wrong of him to not offer the same incentive to women. Although it is true that women are more likely to vote than men, the female customers Floyd knows are not representative of the entire female poplation in the
His idea is still pretty interesting though.
2 comments:
That's clever. Although the part about excluding women isn't really fair, I can understand why he does it. He's gotta make a living too, and maybe giving it to women will make him lose too much money.
(Ok, Tony keeps commenting on the posts I want to comment on. Not that it's wrong or anything, it's just weird.)
I think that the haircutter's idea is pretty novel, but it's sad that people will go vote, something that's so critical to increasing democracy and promoting change that people want, only if they get something in return (even though the real reward should be expressing your political beliefs, which would probably solve the problem with people feeling that what they vote for won't be done anyway, even though the real problem is that they themselves need to get out to vote if they want to see change).
In response to Tony's conjecture about why the haircutter won't offer the same discount to women, I think that regardless of profit, the haircutter will have a greater profit if he included women simply because they would be more inclined to both vote and get haircuts. Even though women probably have a higher tendency to get more expensive haircuts, the haircutter would still make more money and have better business. Also, if his hair cuts are good, he might get better business because of it. Who's to say, though, that it's unfair that he's only offering it to guys? It's his shop and ultimately, he's getting more people to vote. Hopefully these people actually make informed decisions, though. I feel like that's the most important part.
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