Bargaining

Lots of things in China are not sold at a set price; there’s an expectation that buyer and seller will dicker. Sometimes it’s clear which system is in use -- in the grocery store, for example, prices are fixed. In fact, in the grocery store, prices are in the computer. If, at checkout, the computer doesn’t recognize a bar code, the checkout person can’t sell the product. You can see a little pile of items accumulating on a nearby counter, where the clerks throw what they can’t get a price on. It’s not clear to me why, in that situation, the checkout person doesn’t just call for a price like they do at home -- it’s not like there aren’t lots of store employees standing around with time on their hands to make use of by staring at foreigners. ;) I’m sure there’s a reason, I just don’t know what it is.

When the price isn’t fixed, a further complication for the inexperienced visitor is that different markets, and even different vendors, seem to enter the bargaining process/game with different unwritten rules in mind. I have rarely been in situations in life where I’ve had to bargain, but my impression of a “classic” bargaining situation is that the buyer and seller both start the game by suggesting prices that are either lower (the buyer) or higher (the seller) than they’re willing to settle for in the end. Then there’s a back and forth that involves some lowering on one side and some raising on the other, until some number is agreed upon, which (in my fantasy) is probably a lot of the time about halfway between the original offers.

Well, it may not work that way at home a lot of the time either -- I don’t know, maybe I’m too naïve. But it definitely doesn’t work that way here. Or rather, it works that way now and then, but it works every other imaginable way too. Depending.

It’s “depending on what” that isn’t clear, except that the first rule, everywhere there’s bargaining, seems to be “soak the tourists.” Or maybe it’s “soak the ignorant,” that is, anyone, tourist or not, who’s ignorant of the process and/or ignorant of what things should really cost.

A typical example is a blue hanging (very cheaply made, but gorgeous colors, and I wanted it, okay?) that I bought when we came down from the Great Wall. Jamie asked the woman at the stand how much she wanted for it, and she said 150 (150 yuan). He said that was too much and we started to walk away. She then said 100 and Jamie again said it was too much and we started to walk away. He asked me in English what I was willing to pay, and having been through this a bunch of times already I said 20. (He thought it should have been about 3, but we didn’t try that number.) When the seller asked what we were willing to pay, Jamie said 20. The seller said no and started to go on about how that wasn’t enough, she couldn’t make any money that way, etc. (Some of them actually get tears in their eyes when the sob story starts.) She may have then offered 30 (I don’t remember for sure). Jamie said no again and we started walking. Then she called after us, “Okay, 20.” Just like that.

I’ll say more about bargaining when I write about the “antiques” market in Beijing, but meanwhile, the souvenir sellers at the Great Wall are class by themselves. I wasn’t sure whether to be glad or sad that the place was so uncrowded the day we went. If it had been more crowded, there would have been a lot more souvenir sellers; as it was, a lot of the booths were shuttered. But if it had been more crowded, there would have been more tourists to serve as targets of the sellers, and we might have been able to get by them with less hassle.

They are very aggressive. They stand in your way to prevent you from walking past, and if you start to walk past they put their hands on you and physically try to keep you there. They say a couple of words of English, including “dollar” -- they kept saying they were selling t-shirts for a “dollar.” We weren’t sure whether this meant they actually wanted a dollar bill -- technically, that’s illegal -- or what. I was glad Jamie was there to warn me ahead of time about the onslaught, and to steer me past the booths. It feels weird to me to be getting into the habit of constantly ignoring people -- both vendors and the people who stare at us all the time. But the vendors are in a sense just playing a game that I don’t know how to play, and the people who stare at us -- well who knows, I suppose there are a lot of different motivations for that.