Bargaining is one of the great lost arts among individuals. It is the process of arriving, quite literally, upon the actual value of an item or service. As I write this, it occurs to me that by shunning bargaining, stores have shifted that burden from the seller to the consumer…we now shop around. Would a bargain-based economy better for the environment? Anyhow, I digress…
I mentioned recently that I posted an old ThinkPad that I built from eBay parts on Craigslist. A (Vietnamese) woman very enthusiastically contacted me about it because her old ThinkPad of similar vintage had been recently broken by her daughter. This whole experience is probably worthy of a post in itself at some point. But, on the phone, she said, “I see you have ‘$45 or offer’ on the ad…how much you take for it?” Here, let me show you my cards so you know I’m bluffing. I told her that I had about $45 in the computer and would like to get that; but, she was free to offer me what it was worth. “Forty dollah, thirty-five dollah, thirty dollah?” she said. I told her I’d take $40 for it.
So, what’s wrong with this? Well, lots of things.
- Never ask the seller what they’ll take for it…you don’t find that out until the end!
- If you have the opportunity to see the item before buying, don’t start bargaining until you’ve seen it.
- Don’t start bargaining at the top. I don’t think I’d have let it go for less than $40. But, when she said $40, I can’t go lower than that anyway. She’s blocked herself in at $40-$45.
Maybe this is a cultural difference. But, I doubt it.
