The Art of the Haggle, by Cecil Farthingwell (my nom de plume)

This is Axel. I am home for a day before I am off to NYC for my GM training. Coming home for two days and then leaving again for two and a half weeks is almost worse than not coming home at all. It is like eating one Doritos chip. Ugh. I have a million things I could write about. My wife, my kids, coming back to clean Dubai after living in chaotic Nepal, but yesterday Terah and I did our new favourite hobby which is buying carpets so I thought I would write about the art of the haggle. I have done this in many countries, but the basics are the same no matter where you go.



Step 1 – You have to know the price. Only in America do price tags mean what they say. Many places don’t even have price tags on anything, and even if they do, it is more of a suggestion on where to start rather than what you should pay for it. After living in Nepal for 5 weeks, as near as I can tell nothing has a price tag on it, except for one book I bought for my dad, and even that I got for a 15% discount after some haggling. So you have to do your research. You have to pick a store you aren’t going to buy from and go in and spend half an hour to find out just how low he will go. If they give you a price start at 40% of that. Get to know the guy. Tell him you aren’t really interested, but what does he have. You would rather be somewhere else. You didn’t drive an hour through terrible traffic and bring your kids to a shop to buy carpets. But now that you are here, let’s just see what you got. If this is a big item, you need to do this with at least two other stores. Get the names of the guy you worked with and drop them in the next store. Whatever the lowest price you got from the last guy, tell the new guy he offered a price of 80% of that and you should probably go back there.



Step 2 – Never buy the first time you go. After you selected the store you trust, If you have time, make sure you come back twice before you buy. The first time make them work. Our best time for buying carpets in Dubai was in the middle of the summer. We would go in killer heat and make the Afghanis pull carpet after carpet. They would be dying and we would ask for more to be pulled. Believe me, after that the true prices started to emerge.



Step 3 – Now you know the price, the dealer and what you want – it is time to buy. Come with the exact change in cash you need. Small bills are needed. There is no such thing as getting change during the sale. So be prepared. Make them work again, and when you see what you want DON’T let them know. You have to find fault in the ‘quality’ and compare it again to the shops that are just down the road. It will tick them off. Have some word or sentence that tells your spouse that is what you want with out giving it away. Ie, ‘Oh my gosh, look at that piece of crap!’ works pretty well.



Step 4 – Select twice more than what you want. This way you can get rid of some during the haggling process and they get scared you aren’t going to chose any like last time you were there. When you are down to what you really came to buy, then get them as low as you can go by starting with 80% of the price you got last time. If you speak their language, now is the time to use it as it will further disarm them. Tell them you live there and have lived there for many years. Also tell them if they give you a good price, you have lots of other stupid American friends who you will send back and that is where they will make their money. Then low ball them even more than your price and show the cash. They will refuse it.



Step 5 – the walk away. If you didn’t walk away you got screwed. If they didn’t refuse to take your cash you showed first, you are too high. When you walk away do so with conviction, but keep the cash where they can see it. It kills any haggler to see cash walking away. If they are good, they won’t call after you until you get to your car. If they call back sooner, you just got some small trinkets for free. As you enter the store after ‘the call back’, get them to give you the stuff first, but before you give them the cash, grab something small from their store you also want an insist you get that too because you are getting so screwed on price. These are the ‘bonus gifts’ of the haggle. This is Terah’s job. To be on the look out for what she wants small and grab it as we leave.



Step 6 – Give them a bit more than you haggled for. I learned this one in Croatia. We used to have to buy our veggies at the market (which will happen again in Nepal). So even when you bought tomatoes you would have to haggle. One day I was going to TOWN on a 90 year old lady (who was probably only 42) who didn’t look like she could walk, see or use her left arm very well. You know,’ how can you sell these crappy tomatoes for that price; I will probably get worms from them, if I buy from you; I will have to remember your huge mole with hair on it while I eat them.’ You know, the usually stuff. I got her down from 10 Kuna to 6 Kuna and I was trying to get it down to 5. Then Terah came up and said, Axel, could we go? I told her I almost had her to 5 and all I needed was a few more minutes to figure out how I could use the memory of her dead children to bring the price down any more. Then Terah pointed out “Axel, it is .15 cents. Maybe she needs it more than you”... I gave her the 10 Kuna and called it good.



Step 7 – Buyers remorse. Don’t worry, it will come no matter how good a job you did. In the end, if the transaction happened, the amount of money you paid was more than how much they valued the goods. But don’t worry about that. I remember a story I heard in my econ class in Thunderbird. It was about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. One had a frog and the other a cat skull. They went back and forth for an hour and finally they made the trade. And both went away richer. Whenever buyers remorse sets in that is the story I think of.



Plus, where else can you legally give a 90/42 year old woman so much trouble for so little and feel good about it when it is over?