Thursday, January 3, 2013

Dickering

I overpay Hos. I like him, and he is charming in his own way. Three days work for him amounts to seventy-five dollars. In Cambodia, that will feed your family for a month, possibly longer.

It always strikes me as odd when I run into penny-pinching travelers. These people spent thousands of dollars on airfare, equipment, are missing income from their jobs to go out and travel, but they niggle with a cab driver over a few bucks. It's a strange frugality, and I find myself guilty of it, too.

As a tourist, you simply aren't going to pay what the locals do – for anything. And every time you try to, it's a long, and at least for me, distasteful bargaining process. I was born and raised in a place where everything has a fixed value. You don't negotiate with the barista over how much your coffee is. You just buy the damn coffee.  Having to haggle over something as simple as a beer drives me up the wall.

So, I usually end up "overpaying," which really means that I didn't pay local price. Most of the time, this doesn't bother me. While I'm not what most Americans would consider rich, I do have the financial resources to go on a six-month walkabout. This is due to the incredible generosity of my Grandmother, as well as the foresight of my parents, who started saving for my education before I was even born. Since I gained the ROTC scholarship, much of that money has been saved for something special, and I've been lucky enough to be able to go on this trip because of it.

I consider myself a relatively frugal traveler; I eat cheap street-meat, stay in hostels, and often times take night buses to combine travel days with accommodation. With that said, I'm not going to spend half an hour over the equivalent of two dollars when I want to buy a souvenir or get a ride somewhere. 99% of the time my economic situation is orders of magnitude better than the person I'm haggling with, and while a few dollars in either direction won't break me, it might make a big difference to him or her.

I've heard haggling described this way: You both make offers; they're usually far above and below what you think you should pay, and what the other’s willing to sell it for; then you make counter offers and eventually meet in the middle. A truly successful haggling experience has both parties walking away feeling like they paid or got a good price for whatever you're haggling over.

I like this. This is how I tend to treat it. The major difference between other travelers and me is that I don't mind not paying local price. But the point is, both parties walk away happy.

Recently I bought some tiles from a shop in Seljuk, Turkey. I'm 100 percent sure that I overpaid for them, despite an hour's worth of negotiation.

But I got my tiles, and I'm all right with the price I paid. Bottom-lining it, that's all that really matters.
 
- Doug 

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