Peculiar marketing judgment

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While waiting in line for an Rx at my neighborhood drugstore I found myself studying the early pregnancy test shelf, vaguely musing how new and unreliable that technology was back when I was in fighting form, reproductionwise.

Since then, these devices have evolved beyond merely returning a certain color that correlates positively with pregnancy---I think it was blue in the early '80s---sort of like testing pH with litmus paper. Today the competing vendors use different indicators for pregnancy-positive and -negative results. One test kit uses + and - signs, another uses | and O symbols, and a third uses a pointless and almost illegible LED display that indicates "pregnant" or "not pregnant." Hmm, I thought to myself: consumer choice!

Then I noticed that the CVS house brand test kit illustrated the product on the box as showing a positive (+) result. So I compared it with the three other brands of test kits on the shelves, and discovered that all but one depicted the test wand as displaying a positive pregnancy result. One brand---it has the word "blue" in the trade name, but I can't remember it---showed the display indicators as insets to the main product illustration, but the test wand was simply showing a blank result, as it would when one removes it from its sterile wrapper.

It seems to me that most people who are anxious to get early pregnancy test results---"up to 5 days before period!" as the most serious brand proclaims---are probably looking for a negative result, not a positive one. So it made me wonder what kind of unholy alliance between corporations and the religious right might have cooked up this subtly anxiety-inducing packaging. And then I realized that it was a self-answering question.