Dude, you’re totally missing the point. Go back and re-read the context. Hint: the context is that someone is whining that “it’s not fair” that someone can get a better price because he has the talent to get that better price. Kimmy_Gibbler seems to understand.
Same reason a person with good negotiating skills gets a higher salary- because they can.
That doesn’t make it fair.
I don’t have a “take-it-or-leave-it final offer price”, because I don’t know what the price is at other dealerships. I’m not being lazy. I’m quite willing to go to 3 or 4 competitors to see their prices on whichever appliance I’m shopping for, and then go back to the one with the best price (or best service, or best combination, or whatever).
But I can’t do that with a car unless I know each auto dealership’s price.
That’s the value-add to society of shrewd negotiators on both sides of the exchange: price discovery.
If it’s important to you to know that nobody got a better deal on a car than you did and you don’t think your haggling skills are up to that, you should probably go to a place like Costco where you don’t have to haggle.
Other possible solutions would be to get a friend or relative to do the haggling for you, or to pay someone else to do it.
Why shouldn’t people with good negotiating skills make money off those skills? People with good (say) computer programming skills make money using their skills.
People now can haggle for cars via email. That makes it easy to do with 4 or more dealers at 1 time.
Each of those cars has a different value, too. I’m not sure why you understand that two seats on a single aircraft traveling the same route can easily have different value based on how the needs of the buyer and the seller interact, but you don’t think that two vehicles also can. In addition to that, you’re ignoring the time value of negotiating itself (although you seem to understand its value when discussing group rates for airline tickets).
Did one guy just wreck his car and he needs to buy a car today to get to work tomorrow? Well, then that car is more valuable to him, and he should expect to pay a higher price. Does the salesman just need to sell one more of this model to get a bigger bonus? Then that car is more valuable sold, and he’ll come down on the price.
Here’s another way to think about it. Negotiating is about deciding who gets the surplus. Economic exchanges like sales are mutually beneficial. Both the seller and the buyer come away better off as a result. But how much better? If the salesman sells the car for his total cost + $1, then almost all the surplus goes to the buyer. If the buyer spends the maximum amount he’s willing to spend, then almost all the surplus goes to the seller. Somewhere in the middle there’s a range where both buyer and seller get a reasonable amount of the surplus. Now, how do you divide that surplus? You can’t just divide it in half (which would be “fair”) because you don’t know how big it is. You could just stick to a single price, but that’s not actually “fair”, it’s simply consistent. A single price will only guarantee that the seller always gets a constant amount of the surplus value on each sale that’s made. But it would leave all the buyers who have a smaller surplus out in the cold (and thus make the sellers worse off because of that. They’d rather get part of a smaller surplus than none of a consistently large one).
So negotiating is the process by which the parties figure out how to divide the surplus.
I understand perfectly the context of your remarks and I’m saying that there is a larger point about fairness that you are not addressing.
If a particular business model alienates a lot of consumers by leaving them feeling ripped off, then simply stating that the alienated consumers are merely whiners, dopes, or clueless doesn’t address the fundamental issue: the seller has chosen a sales strategy that pisses some people off. It is very short-sighted, or even childish, for salesman to say, “Well, those people just shouldn’t be pissed off! They should just suck it up and conform to the way we want to run our business!” It is more rational for the business to re-evaluate its way of doing business when there is such wide dislike of those practices.
And some dealers have done just that. Saturn used to offer no-haggle pricing (don’t know if they still do), Carmax offers no-haggle pricing, and Costco sells cars with no haggling over the price. If that no-haggle model had been wildly more successful than the haggling model, we probably would have seen other car dealerships going over to it as well. We didn’t see that, which I think says something about how many people are (or rather, aren’t) that upset about the haggling model. If most people aren’t upset enough about the haggling experience to seek out a dealer that doesn’t do it, why should the car dealers change their business model?
I don’t disagree that there is money to be made by the one-price car dealership, for many of the reasons you set forth. But even if every car seller refused to dispense with haggling, I would only say it is wasteful that the car market is not meeting these consumers’ desires when the market could easily do so, which is a very different thing from injustice or unfairness.
For those of you who think haggling is unfair:
Are sales, where an item costs less this week than it did last week, fair or unfair?
What about discounts given to students, or to employees of certain companies or members of groups like AAA? Does it matter if the group they give discounts to is one that you need certain skills to join (college students would be an example)?
Oops, I see. I wasn’t addressing the business model at all. Looks like others gave gotten to it, though.
In Spain it depends on who you’re buying from and what exactly.
If you buy a new car from a dealership, it will basically be fixed price. If you buy secondhand from a dealer, there may be room for haggling. Buy from some dude who’s stuck a “for sale” on his window, and there is likely to be room for haggling but there is also no legal guarantee, it’s totally “as is” and “don’t bother asking questions.”