Then you come back to western world (or anywhere else for that matter) after 6 months of such training and you find out you haggle harder than any locals, sometimes to the point of offense.
The most important point in haggling is to not show too much interest. It helps to have an idea about real local prices of items, otherwise its just shots in the dark.
It was exhausting to buy anything, the entire time. It never got better, even when the shops learned who I was after an extended period of time. Food, water, everything was an argument. I just wanted to exist and check out what was going on around me, not argue with some random shop that my groceries shouldn't be so expensive.
I have also heard the same, but I have zero native-level understanding of any Middle Eastern cultures. Could anyone who lives in the Middle East / North Africa / Horn of Africa comment? I would appreciate any first hand accounts about this stereotype. It's OK if you teach us that it's all "travel guide bullshit"!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals#Comparison_of_...
Eastern Arabic ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ ١٠
However that algorithm has a couple of flaws in mixed left and right ordered text, and a couple of control characters have been introduced to solve the issue: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-unicode-c...
Could play a bit in https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html to see how things work.
And then you step foot in a car dealership, and you might as well be in a souk
Fun when you do it once, not so fun when is expected every day.
A similar zero-sum game is advertising. Yet, some cultures look down on haggling and embrace advertising with open arms...
The waste of time is having to haggle to arrive at the price, when the price could have been published. It benefits nobody, because that's the price the transaction would have happened at anyway. But we have to do a whole song and dance beforehand anyway, every single time.
But price discrimination improves cashflow. And these merchants can do the same thing as haggling with less paper waste and on the spot.
But this is not true. Haggling is price discovery. Either way, I think this is mostly a cultural thing that's lost on a lot of westerners.
Yes, the issue is that the price does not need to be discovered. The seller knows the "real" price, and is just hopping to screw over the buyer.
The seller knows the customary price, and the lowest price they would be willing to accept. The "real" price is whatever the buyer and seller agree on for a particular trade. Price discovery is an ongoing process which isn't finished just because you've determined an average price for past trades. The buyer isn't losing out unless there's actual fraud involved, even if they could have potentially negotiated a better price. And really, we're mostly talking about trades between individuals and small businesses (who may also be individuals)—why should all the surplus value represented by the difference between the highest and lowest prices acceptable to both parties go to the buyer, and not the seller?
True, but the discovery is made necessary by artificial opacity.
It does not benefit society as a whole and that's why shops are legally required to have transparent pricing in most countries.
Honestly, thinking that there should be fixed prices for everything, if you're a rich westerner going in, means you're trying to externalize the effort of setting a market clearing rate, and trying to piggy-back off of the locals. If it's at some multinational chain, then sure, don't have people haggle with you over the price of some McNuggets, but at a family owned business, if they can get an additional 20% of the price of the goods they might be doubling their profit margin, so why wouldn't they haggle?
It doesn't take that long either. There are positives even to things you deem useless.
I don't get this one.
I also hate haggling, and since I’m not from a culture where it’s a norm I can’t use it to read deeper into a person. (Or them into me.) But it’s not too hard to imagine how it helps to build relationships.
A market vendor who knows an apple should cost $2 but charges $5 in the hopes of screwing over a tourist is just an asshole. I can't imagine how that builds relationships.
That is what's frustrating about negotiating for commodities like food. The seller is taking advantage of information asymmetry. They know what the standard price is, and they hope that you don't. It's scummy.
It is different when there isn't a set price, i.e. if you are trying to buy a one of a kind item. In that case even in the Western world some negotiation would be acceptable, (buying an original painting from an artist, for example). But this does not justify having to haggle for everything you want to buy, every time.
While I generally agree with you, if you're buying fresh food at a market, such as the apples in your example, it isn't necessarily a commodity. Quality and size will vary from one item to the next; why must they all be the same price? Places where goods tend to be more standardized seem to rely less on haggling and more on sorting: you don't haggle over the price of an apple out of a mixed lot, you pay a set price for a certain grade of apple which has been separated out in advance.
Even a published price is nothing more than a free option for buyers. It’s a ceiling. There’s nothing that prevents the seller from offering a lower unpublished price.
Couldn't care less if its rude or polite or whatever.
Go ahead and haggle if its fun for you.