The Art of Buying and Selling

September 3, 2007

Getting robbed is a fact of traveling. It is inevitable, that amongst travels in far-flung lands, you will get taken. As naïve travelers, no matter how many guidebooks one may read, we are simply there for the taking. Sometimes it’s a result of our own stupidity. Other times it’s simply because we don’t know any better.

I long ago resigned myself to this fact. While one can live cheaply in much of the world, it will never be as cheap as the ‘natives’. Even for one who knows the language knows the customs and knows the place, a traveler is and always will be a foreigner in a foreign land.

A bottle of water in India may cost upwards of $2 USD—if you pay the asking price. If you shoot one of those ‘you have got to be bull shitting me looks’ the vendors way, the price will drop down to 50¢. If you still balk, you may finally settle on something in the neighborhood of 25¢.

In all my time in India, I never really knew how much a bottle of water was supposed to cost. After leaving, I learned that locals pay about 15¢ and the camera-toting tourists often times pay ten or twenty times more.

Obviously, it’s pointless to quibble over a matter of pennies. For most of us, hailing from the land of $7 coffees and $15 burgers, paying $2, versus paying $1 is a pretty minute difference. For the desperate and hungry trinket salesman, however, it is a vast difference. It means more to him than most of us will ever know.

It’s best not to get upset at the discrepancies. They’re a fact of life; the price it takes to even get to most such places alone justifies paying a little bit extra, once you finally get there—especially since most people one meets would never in their wildest dreams be able to afford the luxury of foreign travel.

But, having said that, it’s important to remember that haggling is the cultural norm in much of the world. The seller is expected to start high, and the buyer is expected to start low. The initial price on something is never the actual price. A real price, in much of the world, is a hazy thing.

The buyer who is afraid to dance the graceful art of haggling is a buyer who is destined to be taken advantage of at every possible opportunity. Sellers are ruthless, and, as such, buyers must be fearless.