Hopefully you understand that moving a product from one aisle to another has nothing to do with changing the product (or the packaging).
Also, I’ll re-ask Babale’s question, what does that have to do with this scenario?
Hopefully other readers understand analogies. 
I don’t get it, either.
Yes, there are hair care products targeted specifically for people of African descent. Not just women, either, although such products for women heavily dominate the “Black hair care products” shelf. One item popular among Black men at the store I work at is a product for removing facial hair without shaving, thereby avoiding “razor bumps” which Black men are much more prone to due to the way their very, very curly hair can become ingrown more easily than the hair of men with straight whiskers.
But these products are not treated as “default” products, they’re products that are positioned outside of the mainstream, prominently displayed front-shelf items. The can be stocked in smaller amounts, they can cost more (for several reasons), and they almost never go on sale.
Try asking the question you want the answer to.
Sure, and when you come up with a good one we’ll be sure to comment on it.
Uh, … That bothers me a lot more than when a product slightly changes the wording on its label. I’m guessing that’s true for most people. Changing the color of the package is in between the total non-problem of minor labeling changes and the modest problem of items moving around.
My supermarket has been rearranging a lot of items, recently. And now that you bring it up, i find it a bit annoying. I sometimes need to ask for help to find something I’ve never had trouble finding before. And yet, i didn’t think it was interesting enough to start a thread to complain about it.
I’m really late to this thread. I have a friend who’s a 6’1" female who explains it as "I may be out of the ‘average’, but I’m fully ‘normal’ ".
“Normal” is the wrong term to use when what they mean is “middle-ground”. “Average” is more accurate.
Different people are annoyed by different things. I don’t have the same problems you do in navigating this site, for example, but I can still sympathise with the feeling because I’ve had it in other circumstances. I’m just trying to explain why someone may be bothered by what they see as a pointless, unnecessary change.
I wouldn’t have started a thread either, but eh. At least supermarkets don’t pretend there’s anything virtuous about it when they annoy you by rearranging the shelves. 
How will removing the word ‘normal’ from the packaging of a subset of products that are treated as the default help with any of that?
Define “help”. What’s the goal here?
It’s not just about race, although I’m sure that’s a large component.
There will continue to be a market niche for Black hair care products marketed to that demographic, and people who will want to support businesses owned by Black people that are by and for Black people.
But removing “normal” also removes stigma that might arise in other people for whom those products do not fit. I already mentioned that as a teenager I felt stigmatized and not normal because I couldn’t use most of the “normal” products on the shelf due to a medical issue. Doesn’t mean everyone is affected in that manner, but it’s an issue that’s out there.
If you haven’t ever been in a group that is outside what is defined as “normal” than maybe you just don’t understand.
And, as pointed out, this decision wasn’t based on some Social Justice Warrior movement, it was based on company-sponsored market research. The company doing this isn’t doing this out of some moral impulse or socio-political agenda, they’re doing it because they think it will be attractive to customers and increase their profits.
Not that it’s any of your business, but I am. And I’ve come to feel very cynical about these sort of language changes. I believe they are largely for the benefit of the person or business making the change, with the supposed beneficiaries often not even consulted. (You agree that that’s the case in this example. In my view the purpose is to get free publicity.)
And since these linguistic alterations allow people to feel like they are doing something helpful without making the effort required for real substantive changes, those changes become that bit less likely.
You are correct it’s none of my business, but I did frame that as a hypothetical and not an absolute. Since you say so I’ll take your word on it.
Yep, we’re in agreement here.
It’s like “greenwashing” or “pinkwashing” a product - a superficial change at best.
To the extent that this could help a consumer get products more targeted to their needs it’s a potential benefit… but that’s a big if. There will still be all sorts of marketing about stuff being “natural” or having “organic ingredients” or exotic ingredients and all the other marketing BS intended to separate consumers from their money. Not to mention the exploitation of workers involved in the production of this stuff and potential environmental damage (see “micro plastics”).
[quote=“Babale, post:99, topic:937554, full:true”]
Other than it’s something that happens? I’m confused too.
My guess: It’s a marketing technique.
The goal is to keep you in the store longer and force you to wander around more so you do more impulse buying as you pass things.
Can we agree that neither removing the word “normal” nor moving the shampoo to be near the brushes rather than near the hand soap, is going to be a huge deal for consumers, and that some may be briefly annoyed, others may find the new arrangement slightly more pleasant, and in five years most of us won’t remember either?
You mean things will go back to normal the way they were?
People have a habit of getting very agitated over changes to the world that have no conceivable way of impacting them negatively. It’s no secret that they aren’t harmed by the name of a toy, pancake mix or whether a person they don’t even know is married or not.
Yes, exactly. Some kind of -washing is how I see it.
I did explain this twice already.
Earlier in the thread I said the main argument against this sort of thing is that all the little changes accumulate to make our lives more stressful. @puzzlegal has said in other threads that she prefers to orient herself spatially, as opposed to other people who might eg. rely on searching for a word they recognise in the ever-growing array of bafflingly-labelled hair care products. It’s easy to dismiss problems when they don’t impact you, so I thought a spatially based example might help illustrate how small changes can be a real annoyance.
I once ‘lost’ a product I liked because they completely changed the packaging. Thought they’d stopped selling it and didn’t rediscover it until weeks later. It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still annoying.
(And yeah, moving things around is a marketing technique, and so is greenwashing, pinkwashing etc.)
Yes, “somebody moved my cheese”.
If you’ve always bought “normal” shampoo (and haven’t already moved on to “shampoo”, which I suspect I did due to some company being ahead of this particular marketing curve) then you lose a little bit of reassurance that “yes, this shampoo is appropriate for your hair” when the marketing descriptions change.
I look for a shampoo that has sodium laurel sulphate and not too many other active ingredients, because I know that works well on my hair. (and then stop buying ones that don’t smell good to me.) But I’d guess most people don’t look at the ingredient list to pick their shampoo. 
Well, the words “normal” and “abnormal” have always had mental health overtones to them. “He’s not normal!”, for example or, “He’s definitely abnormal.”
A number of years ago at the “Nice Guys” web site, a gay poster once asked, “Do you think being gay is abnormal?” I answered that, if the assertion that gays represent approximately 10% of the population is anywhere near accurate then, statistically, gays are “outside the norm”. So, technically, they are “abnormal”, but I would never use that term because it has connotations that I consider undesirable. “Outside the norm” is a phrase used in statistics.