So, one day I’m in an antique store, looking at a dresser. Now, there’s no denying it’s a pretty little thing: late 1800s, walnut burl, brass drawer handles, an elegant shape. But the sales sticker says $4,800, which is more than a little out of my price range, especially for a dresser I don’t need. Even for a dresser I do need. At $4,800, I’d have to hide it beneath a chamois cloth and uncover it once a year—on my birthday, probably, with a glass of wine to toast its posh existence.
Turns out, however, that $4,800 wasn’t the actual price. While the friends who had dragged me into the store ooh’d and ahh’d over glass knickknacks in a display case, a saleslady slid smoothly into place beside me and said, “Lovely, isn’t it? How much would you pay for it?”
I said I couldn’t pay anything for it, because I didn’t need a dresser, but even if I had a use for another piece of furniture, I couldn’t afford a $4,800 dresser, especially one that didn’t come with something like a chamois dustcover and a bottle of wine for my birthday.
I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen anything as condescending as the knowing smile I got from the salesclerk in that antique store. “Oh,” she told me, as gently as though she were trying to explain rocket science to a curious but backward child, “that’s not the price.”
I suggested that $4,800 really did look like the price, what with the round sticker on the dresser reading $4,800. And in reply I was treated to a small lecture on how things worked in the store—a lecture on how things worked “in the real world,” she assured me. Price tags are never about price. They are opening bids in a negotiation. If a customer is fool enough to pay the listed cost, all the better for the store (and the salesclerk’s commission). But hardly anyone does pay that price. People who live in the real world know that they should always make a lowball offer in return. People who live in the real world know they need to bargain.
I think I missed the moment when America turned into Hollywood’s picture of a 1940s street bazaar in Cairo. Oh, the salesclerk admitted that she usually didn’t try to bargain at a supermarket or a fast-food restaurant. But in most other places, most other times, out-bargaining someone was part of the joy of buying and selling. Wearing someone down was the point.
She couldn’t seem to hear any odd moral undertones in her praise of haggling. But, then, neither can many others. Every year or two, you’ll see a newspaper column or light magazine essay about bargaining. Usually they’re expressed in terms of empowerment: The authors were once too fearful to ask for discounts, but then they found the courage to confront sellers and argue about price.
Is that all a distaste for haggling is? A cowardice to be discarded by the brave and the newly self-empowered? Fixed pricing was brought into general use by the Quakers, first in Great Britain and then in Pennsylvania. The success of Quaker-owned department stores in the 19th century spread the practice of price tags to nearly all retail sales in America. (Excluding horse-trading—and the manners and morals of horse-lots would pass in turn to car dealerships, where buyers and sellers alike expect to bargain.)
Moral concern drove the idea of openly displayed prices. Haggling was a species of lying: sellers dishonestly overvaluing their wares, and buyers dishonestly undervaluing them. The Friends were instructed to let their yea be yea and their nay be nay, using honest measures and holding to fixed prices. And thereby even the marketplace, the center of commerce, could be evangelized—freed from deceit and the cruelty of trying to get the better of other people.
On the whole, I’d rather live in the Quakers’ world than the hagglers’ world. Rather shop in the Quakers’ markets than the antique store with the not-$4,800 dresser. I don’t think it’s a matter of courage. It feels instead like a matter of not wanting to treat other human beings as adversaries to be out-bargained, outlasted, and outdone. It feels instead like not wanting to participate in lies.
My friends eventually decided they already had all the miniature glass animals one fireplace mantel could reasonably be expected to hold, and we left the antique store without buying anything. It was a relief to move on to a restaurant, where what was printed on the menu was the fixed price for the food—until I saw what hip urban restaurants charge for hamburgers these days. It was almost enough to make me want to haggle.
