When I was younger I was really no good at any kind of haggling. In fact, I was a little uncomfortable with the whole situation. However, after spending some time in southeast asia, I realized that there’s an art form to it and that a lot of things are negotiable that you wouldn’t think actually are.
I spent quite a lot of time negotiating with the dealership on my most recent car purchase that ended well.
Every time my cell phone contract comes up I call the phone company (multiple times if need be) and get an insane deal on new phones (RAZR this time) just to keep me as a customer.
I buy a lot of things through Craigslist and always bargain my ass off. I have a very good batting average when I present a low-ball cash offer in person.
Share your best haggling experiences!
Any haggling should be considered a success if you, personally, feel that you got a good deal and are happy with the way it turned out. Retail value and percentage discount doesn’t really matter in the end. This is a lesson quickly learned in Asia, Mexico, and many other places where you might be bargaining very hard for something that they, literally, only paid pennies for. It’s all about feeling good about your price after the sale.
When I got my last car, they offered the maintenece plan/extended warranty for an extra $69/mo. I said no it wasn’t worth it to me. I really truly didn’t know that this was negotiable. About three minutes later it was down to $16/mo and I took it. I figure since it covers oil changes I just about break even.
We were renting our house from someone in California when I got a job out of school.
When we decided we wanted to buy it, houses like ours were selling for about $125,000. We offered the landlord $102,000. We figured he’d come back with $120,000 and we might settle around $110,000.
He came back with $105,000 and we couldn’t sign fast enough. He was a really nice guy and I didn’t mean to flat-out lowball him. I think he thought that I was being fair because we got along well with each other.
Now, they’re selling for $310,000 and we only owe $82,000 on it.
My better success though was when I was unemployed and turned down offers in Massachussetts to stay in Maryland because of the cost of housing in Mass. Choosing to remain unemployed for a couple more months probably saved me TONS of money in the long run.
I do it with pretty much everything I buy. And you can get a price reduction for just about anything, trust me.
I even haggled the price of ram with Dell and they sold me the ram for less than what I could get it at Crucial. I was going to cancel my home alarm system and got them to come down almost $30 a month. Even if you can’t get the price down, lots of time you can get extras for free. When I worked as an optician, you can usually get them to come down on the frame cost or throw in a coating for free depending on how much wiggle room they have.
Our neighbors were getting their driveway blacktopped and I had called to see how much they charged so I knew the price. Someone told me they usually have a lot of blacktop left so when they were done, I went over and asked them if they had enough to do my driveway. I got my driveway done for less than half what my neighbors paid. (But didn’t tell them)
I reverse haggle.
I sold a diamond ring with an ad in the newspaper (before internet).
It was worth a bit, but since it had been my ex’s and I’d retained it in the settlement I wanted to get rid of it fast so it was priced low.
When people tried to offer me less, I would counter with a higher price. This incensed them.
But I didn’t care. They wanted to say the price was negotiable down but not up. Not for me.
Eventually a guy didn’t try to come down and he got the ring for the cheap price I’d listed it at.
All the rest lost out on a good deal by being greed heads.
Often the markup is significantly more than that. The starting price is often the “Japanese tourist price” and is so unreasonably high that they’re often surprised that someone takes it.
I can really only speak to places like Hong Kong, Vietnam, Bangkok, etc., but haggling is a part of the culture there. If you don’t haggle and just take the listed price, they’re somewhat disappointed. Yeah sure they’ll happily just take your money, but they often enjoy the act of bargaining. As silly as it sounds it’s sometimes a way of bonding with someone.
Oh sure they’ll act all offended at a low-ball…but they’re not.
Like RealityChuck, my most impressive haggling was with my job. I asked for a lot more money in a raise and was turned down. I replied “Okay, I’ve gotten an offer for that exact dollar figure with another company. Consider this my 2 week’s notice.” Within a day I was given a counter offer for $4,000/year MORE than I asked for originally. Nice.
When I’m selling something though, I don’t ever haggle. I learned it at a very young age from my dad who was selling an old pickup truck and I happened to be there for the haggling process.
Some guy - “Well, you’re asking $800… that’s a little high don’t you think? I’ll give ya $500.”
Dad - “Nope. $800 is fair.”
“I guess I could go as high as $600.”
“Nope. I asked for $800.”
“Okay… Let’s split the difference at $700.”
“I really think $800 is fair.”
“Yeah, alright.”
The key to haggling is let the other guy go first. I just bought a truck last week. Advertised for $3000. Edmunds lists it at $4600, personal seller. Met the guy, looked it over, said, “How much are you willing to go down?” He says $2500. I say that’s a little steep, point out some cosmetic problems, I said “Well, I thinking more of $2200 myself.” We settle on $2300. I would have easily paid $3,000, and walked away with a good bargain. This wasn’t even a hard negotiation. Always float it out there, and let the other guy go first.
Yeah, another key point is that it never (really) hurts to try – you’ve got nothing to lose. If the other guy/gal rejects your offers (a la wasson’s dad) you’re no worse off than where you started…unless you’re bizarro-bargaining with Pliny.
I’m pretty uncomfortable with/lousy at haggling. If I am buying something, then I know what I want, how much I think it should cost, and what I expect to pay for it. If the seller states a price within my range, I might say, “That sounds a little high. Could you go down or toss anything in with that?” Maybe I’ll look for something they can toss in at little or no cost to themselves. But if they hold firm, and it is a price I can pay for something I want, I’ll pay instead of trying to find it elsewhere for a few dollars less. I HATE shopping, and generally value my personal time pretty highly.
Or if I’m selling something, I know what my bottomline is that I want to get from it. Usually the dollar amount is less important than simply getting rid of whatever I no longer want/need. So I’ll sell used cars to CarMax or trade them in and lose several hunderd $ to avoid the hassle of selling it my own, dealing with the phone calls and potential buyers, etc.
My wife - OTOH - will negotiate anything. She buys all of our cars, and only calls me in to sign the papers where needed. An impressive aspect of her skill is an ability/willingness to combine completely unrelated things in one deal. For example, I remember one instance where some guy was doing work to our house, and as part of the deal he ended up hauling away our old swingset which we had wanted to get rid of. Instead of paying to have it hauled away, she got him to knock a few bucks off the price of his services AND haul it away for free.
I’d better never divorce the dame or she’ll undoubtedly take me to the cleaners!
We recently bought some property that the sellers were asking 170K for, which was a very reasonable price, low even. We would have paid that. We offered 130, with 30K of that being a trade for another piece of property we owned, owner financed for a year with no payments for 6 months. They actually took it! No counter-offer or anything. We have split the property up and have already made 70K on it, with the value of the rest being at least 200K. Easiest money we ever made.
I would like to note, though, that I’m uncomfortable haggling over small amounts of money. If it isn’t in the thousands of dollars, I don’t really bother.
About 15 years ago, we were in the market for an engagement ring for me; a friend gave us tickets to the gem and jewelry trade show going on in Wash, DC. Said friend advised us to go on the last day, look around all day, find a few things we liked, and start bargaining a couple hours before the show closed. I found a ring I liked: 18k gold, 1/3ct. center stone, 2 1/4ct side stones (diamond). High grade diamonds, too (hubby brought a jeweler’s loupe with him). The ring was marked $750.00. We offered $600.00, he said “no way”. Hubby pulls out six $100.00 bills, and asks if he’s sure he can’t do it. He says, yeah, he can do it. Then he gets his calculator and starts adding all these taxes and fees, and hubby says “Nope, the $600.00 has to cover everything”. The guy says, “no way”. When we turned around to walk away, he changed his tune, and took the cash. It’s a nice ring.
About 13 years ago, I bought a new computer, or at least everything but floppy drive, keyboard, mouse, monitor, sound and video card.
The salesman at the local clone joint attempted to sell me one of their pre-packaged deals and deducting amounts for the parts I didn’t need. Problem was, he was deducting their cost from my amount, which basically keeps the markup.
I said “hang on… why don’t we build it from the bottom up instead of removing from an already defined set?”. He tried to argue somehow about me getting a better price because of the bundle, etc… but in the end, I ended up saving something like 20% versus the salesman’s deduction style. I also ended up getting it for something like 40% off the price listed at CompUSA (or whatever it was called back then).
(I then had to argue with the service dept. moron when I ended up with bad RAM; he pitched a shit-fit because I’d opened the case & broken some sticker. No shit… how else was I supposed to put my own video card and sound card in? What a mongoloid that guy was.)
I am not a haggler. I hate the whole idea of it. I’m not sure this even counts as “haggling,” but the last time we bought a car…oof!
Used Honda, from a Honda dealer. We found what we liked, after an hour of looking, and told the salesman that we had to get out the door under $15,000. No problem, you got it, under 15 grand. We go inside, wait about 45 minutes for the sales staff to run our credit, or whatever, and the sales manager comes back with something like 15,600.
I said something along the lines of “You have got to be fricking kidding me! Did your sales man not tell me that we could get out of here under $15,000? Did you just waste my last 2 hours? If I don’t get that car for the promised price, I will never buy a car here, and warn all my friends!”
We got the car at the right price. I NEVER, and I mean NEVER before or since have acted like that at a business, but I was LIVID.
