How to negotiate!

If you spend any time at all in business or finance, you’ve been up to your neck in “negotiators” and “negotiations.” And even normal folk who don’t dirty their hands with commerce are confronted with a never ending stream of how-to books on negotiating that wash up on the shores of bookshelves seemingly every day. (Funny thing about those books: The price isn’t negotiable.)

Well, as usual, I’m living in my aberrant little node of society’s periphery, because I’ll tell you this: I loathe negotiating. Negotiating is (usually) just haggling. I sure hope that, at the end of this rutted and twisted road of life, nobody says about me, “That Ed, you know, he sure knew how to haggle. He had a low cunning that couldn’t be beat.”

I don’t think anyone will ever say that about me. I’m safe on that count.

Habitual hagglers are usually nasty, petty little people who simply want to indulge their urge to get the best of somebody else.

I can think of all sorts of personal anecdotes for this, from the boardroom to the street, so I’ll take the street angle on this one since it’s the most memorable.

One evening I was strolling around an outdoors market in Chiang Mai, Thailand, half-shopping and half-loitering. Soon, my ears were assaulted with about two million shrill, nasal decibels of American English. Thereupon I spied a tourist woman being as nasty as possible to a poor old Thai lady who was vending decorative fans (the kind you hang on the wall).

The tourist was obviously relishing her “negotiations.” I don’t remember the amounts involved, but, in U.S. terms, the fans cost roughly a dollar. Or maybe 80 cents. Somewhere around there. For a cute hand-painted souvenir of Thailand. Who can argue with that?

Well, you can probably guess who.

The gentle old Thai lady, wearing the wrinkles of hard toil on her aged face, politely held her ground. The hideous tourist beast would storm away, then, like a shark determined to devour its pound of flesh, would circle back and start berating the old Thai all over again.

All this activity was centered on a bid vs. ask spread (to put things in stock terms) of about 15 cents. You read that right: Fifteen cents.

Up until that point, I didn’t like hagglers, or negotiators, but seeing such a raw display of the naked psychology was enlightening. The triviality of the money is what made the lesson so rich. The money wasn’t the issue for the tourist, of course, she was probably expending more than 15 cents worth of calories by her exertions.

What was on display was the clear, instinctive urge to make the weaker party (the old Thai) suffer. To lose. To be bested. And it was being done for recreation, no less.

This scene dragged on for a solid five minutes, if not longer. I stuck around just to watch it.

But I’m happy to report that the old Thai couldn’t be bullied. Finally, the beastly American marched off, muttering, loudly, about those “ungrateful Thais turning down perfectly good money.”

Moving from the street scene to bigger stakes, my disinclination to haggle hasn’t waned over the years. When I’m selling my services, I’m not engaged in some elaborate head-game. And when I’m buying stuff, I have no desire to force a seller into an uncomfortable position.

Talk about a topsy-turvy spin on price theory: When my pals and I buy and sell stuff to each other, the buyer is always trying to increase the price, and the seller trying to reduce it. This doesn’t mean we’re saints. We most certainly are not. But we’re all hard workers, and determined not to engage in opportunism or parasitism.

Sure, sometimes, negotiating just has to happen. And, sure, in some societies, market bargaining is a part of normal life.

But with prosperous people from rich societies, the urge to haggle has more to do with base psychology than high finance.