Driving a Hard Bargain

I'm trying to understand something about financial culture.

I don't know why, but I have this strong aversion to haggling and negotiating prices and money. Rob's folks like to haggle. When I first met Rob, he tried to follow in his father's footsteps. Unfortunately, Rob has none of his father's charm, so Rob mostly insulted people when he'd try to haggle with them. Rob's dad will haggle in Sears over missing buttons. He will haggle for better seating in a restaurant. He negotiates tips. Rob's mother is a complaint-haggler. She will find so much wrong with something to work the price down that you wonder why in the Hell she wants whatever it is in the first place. I've quit going shopping (especially car shopping) with these people because I get uncomfortable and then progress to embarrassed & mortified.

I don't have any strong memories of any of my relatives haggling over anything. Even when we went to swap meets, farmers' markets & yard sales, my relatives just paid the price. They never seemed to give the impression that they expected anything for free. They never talked anything down to get a better price, never complained about how far they'd driven or how much inconvenience they'd gone through to get to the market or sale. I remember a couple of times where my dad asked if someone could 'do anything for him'... but he never got angry or escalated the issue if the price was set. Usually it had to do with trucking equipment - engine parts, tires, that kind of thing. I'm sure my relatives did haggle over big-ticket items - cars, boats, houses, that type of thing. I mean, no one wants to pay sticker price on a car, but realtors & vehicle salespeople are prepared to negotiate when it comes to selling their wares.

I've been asking people things like, "have you ever tried to get better prices on your groceries by haggling w/the cashier?" & "Would you haggle with Wal-Mart?" Rob says that in his part of upstate New York, there was a large Hasidic population and being stuck in a line behind one of them was an exercise in patience. They would indeed haggle over groceries - the kind of thing where they'd bring a single stick of button from a pound package & try to work out a deal - "but I only need 1 stick of butter, not a whole box. You can still sell the other sticks - and can I get a lower price than 1/4 the cost of the package because it's been opened?" I think I'd have to smack someone on principle, but the idea of walking up to a register at any typical retail outlet & trying to make a deal with a cashier seems so foreign to me. It would never occur to me to even try it.

At first I thought maybe my relatives just had stiff necks - they were too proud to haggle over anything. Maybe it implied they didn't have the money or something (my mother's family were horse breeders, too - and horse breeders do haggle - I've seen it in action - but in my mother's family it was limited to the horses and horse supplies). I started asking other people only to find more & more that most people don't haggle over every little thing they buy. Some of the people I've asked even say it's embarrassing or makes you look cheap. I've been having trouble dealing with hagglers at work, and I still don't know how best to approach it. I don't really know what people expect me to do when they start asking for lower rates or upgrades - other than to just hand it over on a silver platter. I can understand asking if a place has a senior, military or AAA discount. I can see just breezing it by, "what's the best rate you can give me?" But the people I get at work spend so much time trying to get a lower rate for everything that I want to ask them after the minutes roll by if it's really worth it?

I found that when Rob would get going at some 'open market' style place, it was just best if I walked away. I would go shop in a different area and let him come find me when he was done. After a few years of me leaving him, and a few dozen car purchases, Rob's even stopped haggling. "It's not worth it - they never want to buy for the price I want to sell, and they never want to sell at the price I want to buy", "It's easier to just pay whatever is on the price tag & be done with it". He's also tired of shopping with his dad because he has to haggle via proxy. His dad can barely talk anymore, so Rob does all the interpreting for the sales clerks. He hates it now, hates feeling like a tool.

It's something I'm going to keep working on, try to find a way to beat it...

In other news, I'm being pigeonholed into being a night auditor again.