I don’t often have an occasion to haggle. And that’s probably a good thing, since I don’t do it very well. But yesterday I went to a local Bazaar. A place where haggling is the only way prices are set.
Now, I wasn’t really planning to buy anything, but as I browsed through the stalls, a few things caught my eye. Specifically a set of hand carved coasters and some marble chess sets.

As I was looking at the coasters, the stall owner came up to me and asked me how much they were worth. Since I had no idea, I told him so. Then he threw out an amount and asked me if I thought that was fair. It didn’t sound bad, and it was definitely less than I would have paid back in the US. So I ended up buying them. I was happy with what I paid, but I didn’t haggle over the price at all. Which means I paid way too much.

That was really driven home by my next experience. At a stall on the other side of the Bazaar, I found some really nice chess sets. Again, the stall owner saw me looking at them, and cornered me before I could leave. he started off telling me what a great deal he could give me on the chess set I was examining. He threw out a number($150) for the set I had in front of me. I wasn’t really sure I even wanted a chess set, and that number made up my mind for me. So I told him I wasn’t interested. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So he lowered the price. I had already made up my mind not to buy it, so the lower price didn’t phase me. But the more times I said no, the lower the price got. By the time I finally said yes, he had reduced the price to $40.

So by accident, I actually managed to do a decent job of haggling. Though I’m sure that if I tried to do the same thing again on purpose, I wouldn’t manage any where near as well. LOL