I have a confession to make:
I have always been rubbish at haggling.
My first introduction to haggling was aged 10 in a suk in
the Arab quarter in Jerusalem. I was
attempting to buy a souvenir. There were
little price tags on things and I chose a pottery plate and went to hand over
the appropriate sum as directed by the tag.
The Palestinian stall-owner pushed my proffered shekels away in a kindly
but impatient way and explained to me that I should be offering a lower price
and that there couldn't be a sale without an argument. I
blindly and falteringly played along with the stall owner, who was after all being
very caring and paternal but I was completely dumbfounded by the whole episode,
not least because the plate was already pretty cheap, but also because I
suddenly found myself playing a strange game, the rules of which I didn't understand and the purpose of which I could not fathom.
Years later I saw the scene in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’
where Eric Idle forces Graham Chapman to waste precious minutes haggling for a
false beard. It was almost a replica
(albeit a biblical parody version) of my 10 year old self’s experience. And the thing is: I still don’t understand
it. I mean! Is it too much to ask for salespeople just
tell me what a thing costs? Will the
markets cease to work if a price is arrived at transparently? Haggling to me seems dishonest somehow. Like cheating, it is secretive and exclusive -
open only to those who have the talent for poker and other dark arts.
Maybe I’m just too Presbyterian and legalistic for my own
good. My cultural upbringing has been
steeped in the principles of monetary obligation. The wages of sin is death. Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors … If the weather’s good today, we’ll pay for it
later…
I never did get the hang of the supposedly Scottish trait of
extracting every last ounce of benefit from any given situation for the lowest
price and I haven’t seen much evidence of this in my fellow country people, if
I’m honest.
But why am I even bothered? It’s because this haggling club has an
illustrious membership of great entrepreneurs, movers and shakers and part of
me would like to be enterprising and persuasive and influential. In short, part of me would like to be in that
club, even if I have just made it sound a bit like the Freemasons.
As a bit of context for my ponderings, I've been looking at
joining a gym in Melbourne to regain some of my long lost fitness. My search was informed by a precise set of
criteria designed to prevent me from not bothering my arse as soon as the ink
was dry on the membership contract. After looking about I thought I’d found one
that filled these exacting criteria, so I booked myself in for a freebie
try-out session online. No sooner had I hit ‘print’ on the online voucher than I
received a call from one of the gym’s hyper-cheerful sales people, who offered
to book me into one of the classes I was interested in as part of my freebie
visit. So far so good.
The visit also went off fine - though the sales guy I'd spoken to on the phone wasn't there. I got all the details of the
membership costs and had a tour of the facilities not to mention use of the gym
and attendance at said class. At the end,
even though I had basically made my choice, I declined to join straight away
because Matt still hadn't got his Melbourne work contract signed and I was
still a bit concerned about how far our money would stretch at this early
stage.
But in the days that followed …
I received no fewer than 2 calls from the sales guy PER DAY,
asking whether I’d yet made my decision to join. Once I started recognising the number, I took
to rejecting the call as soon as it popped up on my phone screen.
Anyway, on a day of particularly heavy gym sales harassment,
I expressed my exasperation aloud to a colleague. ‘Ooooo’ – she said excitedly – ‘they must be
desperate to hit their target – you should totally haggle for a discount’. My heart sank. I
confessed my rubbishness at haggling to her but she wasn't at all daunted. ‘I've done it heaps of times’ – she claimed –‘they will do
anything to hit their targets, these people.
Don’t worry – I’ll coach you in the ways of haggling’. And so she did. And I listened intently. I really did.
And if that wasn't enough, I looked up the internet as well
and found no end of similar advice claiming that only utterly deficient people
join gyms and pay the full membership fee. ‘You wouldn't go to a car
showroom and offer to pay the advertised price, would you, and this is exactly
the same thing’, the internet scoffed. Er well …
actually I probably would, I thought ashamedly to myself. I bet Birgitte Nyborg would talk those slimy car
salesmen down a few grand! Not that I’m planning to be the next Danish prime
minister or anything, but I was beginning to think that the world of
empowerment and entrepreneurship would be closed to me forever if I didn't get
the hang of this haggling thing and soon.
Besides, a car is one of the many big ticket items on our medium-term
shopping list – all of which, I have now discovered, are hagglable.
But still I procrastinated.
Then I got a phone call from a mobile number I didn't recognise and answered it. It was the
gym sales guy. I told him I couldn't talk right then, so he spent the next few days texting me reminders to join the
gym instead.
My colleague was full of confidence – ‘they will totally
give you a discount or at the very least throw in a load of freebies. You see if they don’t!’, she enthused.
The next day, therefore, when the guy called from his mobile
again – this time to give me a guilt trip about my lack of commitment having an
impact on my health (the cheeky bugger!) – I agreed to pop round and discuss
membership further with him.
Armed with my gym kit and lots of confidence injections from
the colleague, I marched up to the reception counter. ‘Go over there and wait’, they suggested, ‘and
the sales guy will be out shortly’. So I
waited. When finally someone appeared it still wasn't the guy who’d been calling and texting me incessantly, but one of
his assistants who bounded up to me all smiles and enthusiasm like a golden
retriever puppy. This wasn't going to
plan. I'd managed to work up a bit of dislike for the sales guy but this one seemed genuinely nice. Driving a hard bargain with this other guy would be that much more difficult. My imagination was already beginning to conjure up images of the original sales guy as this hideously disfigured recluse who runs all his sales operations from a darkened airless office and only sneaks in and out of said office in the dead of night.
My colleague had warned me that if
it was a lackey trying to sell me membership they’d not necessarily have the authorisation to offer a
discount. In spite of this, I
tried. This attempt was met with ‘well
the thing is, we truly believe in our product and that is the price we have
decided reflects the value of what we offer.
It is not our policy to offer people discounts as we believe it is
unfair that some people should pay more for the same products and services than
others’. A slightly rehearsed speech it
had to be said but it totally had me snookered, because THIS IS PRECISELY WHAT
I BELIEVE. It was as if I had been
caught with my hand in the till. I was
almost expecting the guy to tell me he was away to tell my mother what I’d been
up to.
After he’d got his breath back from delivering his spiel,
and I had hollowly expressed regret that this was the situation, he was back to his
bouncy puppyish self, asking me if I was ready to sign up now. In a vain attempt to save grace, I quietly
declined and said I’d need more time to decide.
Since then, it has been rather quiet on the gym front. Well unless you count the texted offer of a consultation
worth AU$200 to assess my cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, BMI, and body
fat ratio as well as various other health indicators if I sign up before the
end of the month. Consultation? Sounds
more like humiliation to me. No thank you. Jeez guys - I’d have settled for a free towel.
So this evening I head off sheepishly to pay the price for my failed attempt at haggling. Oh and to have a nice swim.
