While shopping at Big Lots, Joe noticed identical-looking pairs of gloves in different parts of the store. Yet the “garden gloves” in that department aren’t the same as the “work gloves” in the hardware department. Why not? Since Big Lots has many of the products they sell manufactured, we asked the company directly. The gloves that appear identical aren’t.

You can excuse Joe for thinking that the gloves are the same: they’re made from what looks like the same fabric, same color leather, and using the same pattern. Even the stitching looks identical on the outside. Yet this isn’t a case of fuzzy math, necessarily.

Here’s the explanation that Big Lots sent over:

While the gloves certainly look similar, the palms are manufactured differently, which accounts for the difference in price. The hardware glove has a basic leather palm with starch cuff and patch palm (patch palm is made of multiple leather pieces sewn together to make a full palm). The garden leather palm is created of a full leather palm that is a little more premium with a reinforced palm patch, which costs more to produce.

We understand that these differences are not visible until you look at the palm. With that said, we take feedback from all of our consumers seriously and are working with our buying team to further differentiate these gloves as to not confuse consumers.

That does make sense: you can see if you look closely that the leather on the palm does look different. However, if one shopper was confused enough to photograph the gloves together and send them to us, he probably isn’t the first one to become confused. Even making the gloves in different colors would probably help simplify things for customers who are uneducated in the ways of glove construction.

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