We haggle for things which have high optionality in their details. If its a loaf of bread of unit weight, and white grains of stated quality, it's unlikely you'd haggle except at the end of the working day when it becomes "yesterdays bread" and has different value to "tomorrows bread"
A car can be the wrong colour, with or without a lighter, have cop tires, cop engine, a chicken, two pieces of white bread.. There's a lot to haggle about.
What the article doesn't explore at length is how the haggle is itself asymmetric because their willingness to cut price excludes telling you of a better choice outcome for another vehicle. Once you're in the haggle, you're haggling about THIS car.
I have persian friends who haggle about everything. Sometimes, it works. Furniture floor stock can be hard to move. Dent and scratch white goods can be hard to move.
The thing people routinely haggle over is a car, typically secondhand but often new. But they do actually haggle about other things: its culturally defined.
I hate haggling. I was walking around the grand bazaar in Istanbul with a giant "rip me off" sign flashing over my head. It took me 2 hours to spend the same $25 on the ticket for something, because of my reluctance to propose $15 for something clearly worth $5.
I like to imagine successfully haggling the price of the car down and then watching the dealer removing the seats and tires.
We haggle because we like to pay fair prices. Except for the jerks who have means who aggressively haggle down poor merchants on things (ex. Item costs pennies in buyer’s equivalent currency and yet still haggles and haggles), I don’t mind paying the full extent of my consumer surplus if I’m in a pinch, if I was dying of thirst I’d give you all the money in my pocket/bank/etc to get water. But I will haggle till I’m out of breath to not get fleeced on something that to me is a “reasonable sum” (something that I might by at home when not traveling), just because I’m a tourist. This happened a few days ago. While in Portugal I paid a fair price for a blanket to use on the beach where the merchant wanted 20 when the going raid was 10-12 euros.
A car can be the wrong colour, with or without a lighter, have cop tires, cop engine, a chicken, two pieces of white bread.. There's a lot to haggle about.
What the article doesn't explore at length is how the haggle is itself asymmetric because their willingness to cut price excludes telling you of a better choice outcome for another vehicle. Once you're in the haggle, you're haggling about THIS car.
I have persian friends who haggle about everything. Sometimes, it works. Furniture floor stock can be hard to move. Dent and scratch white goods can be hard to move.
The thing people routinely haggle over is a car, typically secondhand but often new. But they do actually haggle about other things: its culturally defined.
I hate haggling. I was walking around the grand bazaar in Istanbul with a giant "rip me off" sign flashing over my head. It took me 2 hours to spend the same $25 on the ticket for something, because of my reluctance to propose $15 for something clearly worth $5.
I like to imagine successfully haggling the price of the car down and then watching the dealer removing the seats and tires.