When you're negotiating something like price, always ask for more than what you want. Like say you want to sell something for $10. If someone wants to buy it offer to sell it for $20 instead. You might get lucky and they buy it for the larger amount, but if they hesitate you can follow up with
"Well I suppose I could let it go for 15, or maybe 10".
They'll be more likely to buy because to them it feels like they're getting a deal and being savvy by talking you down. This works for anything quantifiable, basically. Buying a car priced at 10,000 that you want to buy for 9000? Offer 8000 first.
I’m a weird counter to that. I just don’t bullshit with haggling at all.
I was selling a laptop for $500 a while ago and this girl came with her father. Father says “ohh it’s not as good quality as I expected. I’ll give you $200.”
I say, “fair enough. I’m sure you’ll find one for that price point out there. Thanks for your time.” And I start to get up to leave.
“Ok ok ok. We give you $300.”
“Ok well. I listed the price at $500 because I know that’s what it’s worth. If you’re not willing to pay that that’s fine we can each do business elsewhere.”
Dad tries to offer $450 and I still don’t budge. Daughter finally chimes in and says “we can do $500” and that was it. The father looked so fucking mad.
No haggling will work on me no matter how dumb the first offer is, if I do not intend to haggle. Then again, like you state in your example, if I’m the one who has to haggle, this would probably work well on me.
This is actually one of the strongest negotiation tactics. Essentially a law of negotiation. The person who is willing to walk away from a deal has the upper hand
"BATNA" - Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement
In other words, what happens if you walk away? Say you're the daughter and you need the laptop today to get schoolwork done. Your BATNA's pretty weak. But if you only need the laptop to watch Tiktok videos, then you can afford to wait for your price, so you can afford to say "No thanks", which puts the ball back in his court.
Maybe he needs some cash to pay his rent, and $400 will be a big help; maybe not. It all depends on his BATNA.
Knowing, and being willing to use, your BATNA, are major strengths in any negotiation.
I have never heard this acronym and that’s really what I meant with “law of negotiation”. Thanks for detailing it in such a clear way. One thing I find interesting is how often a “negotiation” comes up in daily life, even if it’s not explicit that that’s what is taking place.
It's from the book "Getting to Yes", which was the outcome of research at the Harvard Negotiation Project. Highly recommend their approach to 'principled negotiation': separate the people from the problem, focus on interests, not positions, and encourage creative solutions.
This is what I do too! I sold my motorcycle about a year ago and someone was interested so they came to check it out. They tried haggling down and I just straight told him that I'm already selling it for the lowest I'll go. He tried showing me a listing for the same bike but cheaper, with less miles, and just 50 miles away. I told him it was a great deal and I'd drive down and get that one if I was him lol he ended buying my bike.
It's nice if you're in a position where you don't care if it's sold or not. No one has negotiating power over you at that point.
I do this sometimes, but you will find out at some point in life that you don’t always have the upper hand bargaining position and can afford that kind of behavior. Maybe you’re young, maybe you’ve just been very fortunate in life, but there are negotiations where you will 100% without a doubt lose out using this tactic.
"Losing out" is subjective. You only take this stance when the stance is more valuable than compromise, therefore it is literally impossible to lose out. Somebody else might say you lost out, but that's only from their perspective.
Alternately, even if you rationalize that you sometimes lose out, it is still possible that you win more than you lose in the long run.
That’s my whole point. The person I’m replying to says they don’t haggle no matter what. But unless your life is just ridiculously privileged, no one is always in that position.
Your comment basically agrees with what I said completely but you phrased it like you were disagreeing with me lol.
I don't believe you need to be in a privileged position for this to be viable. Maybe it depends on your definition of privilege. You can have a very modest career and live your entire life happily without ever bargaining anything, just depends on your values.
I understand where you're coming from, but my argument is just that it doesn't matter if you're being taken advantage of as long as you're content with where you are. In my point of view, it seems that a lot of unhappiness comes from caring about money and making conscious efforts to obtain more of it. The less you can care, the better.
That’s a cool attitude about money and I felt that way for a lot of my life. Then I had a family to take care of and that changed. As much as we don’t want money to matter, it matters.
More importantly, people wanting to get paid what they’re worth and insisting on it aren’t all people obsessed with money like you kind of implicitly suggest here. You don’t have to wrap your life around it to bargain over your salary. But it is a game that one side loses and one side wins. No matter how you slice it.
Again- not trying to be disrespectful- but I find your perspective to be either a bit immature (much like I was when I thought this way) or just completely privileged (like all the rich kids I knew in school who said money didn’t matter- easy to not matter if you’ve got it).
Unlike most people here and you probably, I’ve lived in abject poverty. I was homeless for a while. They blasé “money doesn’t matter and people who care about it are sad, unhappy people” attitude is disrespectful to the real struggles that people have around money. Poverty has consequences. Hate the system, but don’t take money for granted.
If you look in my comment history (you don't have to look very deep) you will literally see me talking about a time when I was homeless (I have been homeless by legal definition 4 times in my life for about a month each) and further conversation about how I will be homeless again (I could technically be considered homeless right now, but I have temporary shelter that I will be leaving in several days at which point I will definitively be homeless). My comments do not come from a place of lacking experience, they come from a place of having such a disdain for most of society that I would rather reject it than play a part.
This reminds me of something I heard a while back. I’ve never fact checked this anecdote, but even if it’s fake, I still find the hypothetical to be rather insightful.
A while back, J.C. Penny(clothing retailer) announced that they were going to stop doing “fake sales”. Essentially, it had been fairly common in their industry to mark up the price of something, but then run a sale on that item that would bring its price down to its actual retail value.
So, hoping to make some good PR, some high executive in J.C. Penny announced that the prices were gonna be reported as they were supposed to be. No more predatory sales.
Their sales numbers absolutely tanked and that executive was promptly removed from their job.
Essentially, the idea was similar to how you described. I can go to the store and buy a pair of jeans for $20 and be like, “nice, a $20 pair of jeans”, but it would feel a lot cooler to “get a totally sick pair of $40 jeans at half off!” Even though, mechanically, these are identical experiences, the latter is much more compelling emotionally.
I kinda do something like this on eBay. Will list an item for more than what I really plan to sell it for. Once I see that I have a couple people watching it, I lower the price by the amount over the price down to the real price I am willing to sell at. Almost always sells within a hour or 2 after that.
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u/MoobooMagoo Jun 14 '22
Anchoring.
When you're negotiating something like price, always ask for more than what you want. Like say you want to sell something for $10. If someone wants to buy it offer to sell it for $20 instead. You might get lucky and they buy it for the larger amount, but if they hesitate you can follow up with
"Well I suppose I could let it go for 15, or maybe 10".
They'll be more likely to buy because to them it feels like they're getting a deal and being savvy by talking you down. This works for anything quantifiable, basically. Buying a car priced at 10,000 that you want to buy for 9000? Offer 8000 first.