Funny, I found shop vendors from some Arabic cultures would almost become offended if you _didn't_ barter with them -- at least if they knew you weren't just a tourist. For the (American) tourists wandering through they'd suck it up and just charge them 10x the price. ;)

Also funny, I visited Jordan 2 years ago, right before the pandemic. I was expecting to have to haggle prices like in other places but it just didn't happen, didn't feel I was paying tourist prices at all. Street sellers didn't push us to buy stuff. A street restaurant in Amman that didn't have a menu charged us around €4 for the meal, which was dirt cheap for what we had. All in all it was a very nice experience.

Seconded. Jordan is a pretty great place as far as I experienced it too. Though I was not alone myself, but watching interactions with others it was all very decent.

Very true in India too. You stick out as backpacker very clearly, the prices are set accordingly. I found it extremely hard to haggle with my european mentality, and ended up agreeing on still too high prices. It took some time to get better.

Then you come back to western world (or anywhere else for that matter) after 6 months of such training and you find out you haggle harder than any locals, sometimes to the point of offense.

The most important point in haggling is to not show too much interest. It helps to have an idea about real local prices of items, otherwise its just shots in the dark.

That was my least favorite thing about traveling/living overseas as a stereotypical looking American. I hate haggling. I hate it more than anything. It's needlessly antagonistic and completely unnecessary. I understand it's a cultural thing, but I hate it more than birds.

It was exhausting to buy anything, the entire time. It never got better, even when the shops learned who I was after an extended period of time. Food, water, everything was an argument. I just wanted to exist and check out what was going on around me, not argue with some random shop that my groceries shouldn't be so expensive.

When I have traveled to India, I just wear jeans and t-shirt... and yeah, a backpack. :) Obviously, I am a non-native, but I have not experienced outrageous "foreigners-only" prices ever. This experience includes incredibly remote villages in South India as well as urban centre of Mumbai. That said, I understand that many people have difficult experiences with bartering when they travel in South Asia.

"This bloke won't haggle!"

You wrote: <<some Arabic cultures would almost become offended if you _didn't_ barter with them>>

I have also heard the same, but I have zero native-level understanding of any Middle Eastern cultures. Could anyone who lives in the Middle East / North Africa / Horn of Africa comment? I would appreciate any first hand accounts about this stereotype. It's OK if you teach us that it's all "travel guide bullshit"!

Is there any difference in the expectations of haggling if it is a man or woman doing it (on the tourist side)? just curious.

When I lived in Morocco, the prices went down the longer I shopped with particular market vendors. The first time I bought oranges, for example, they were eye-wateringly expensive. As I became a regular buyer, the price gradually dropped until they were a fraction of the original cost. (It would probably have been cheaper to begin with if I'd haggled, but I am not great at that sort of interaction).

In Egypt, it also helps to be able to read the arabic numerals — eastern arabic [0] that is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals#Comparison_of_...

Eastern Arabic ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ ١٠

Yeah, those street markets where there is a "small" deviation between western and eastern numerals if prices happen to be shown.

For some reason I didn't expect you to list them from right to left.

It's "automatic", see https://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup... and https://unicode.org/reports/tr9/

However that algorithm has a couple of flaws in mixed left and right ordered text, and a couple of control characters have been introduced to solve the issue: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-unicode-c...

Could play a bit in https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html to see how things work.

Ah is that what it was. Mixing ltr and rtl text always trips me up. To make matters even weirder it seems that sequences of nummerals, such as ١٠ are ltr again. That has some very unintuitive consequences when you try to edit that sentence.

In countries like that I just don't buy anything. Life is too short for haggling.

Haggling is fun. I’m convinced the modern aversion to haggling in first world countries is because people grow up avoiding all direct confrontation. They think it’s somehow how rude to disagree with someone about the price of the article at hand. The next level of it is when they justify this “politeness” by claiming that haggling is inefficient or a waste of time.

When all sellers and customers haggle it creates a zero-sum game where nothing useful is achieved and everybody is wasting their time.

Fun when you do it once, not so fun when is expected every day.

A similar zero-sum game is advertising. Yet, some cultures look down on haggling and embrace advertising with open arms...

If you look at dollar and time amounts, all financial interactions are pretty much zero-sum.

The transaction itself is not zero sum. The existence of the transaction itself is proof that both parties value what they received more than what they gave away (otherwise they would not have transacted).

The waste of time is having to haggle to arrive at the price, when the price could have been published. It benefits nobody, because that's the price the transaction would have happened at anyway. But we have to do a whole song and dance beforehand anyway, every single time.

This of course is under the assumption that time is expensive relative to the accuracy of the market clearing price of the goods being sold. In many cultures this isn't true, people have lots of free time, but each person buying the good might assign different value to it, so by spending a bit more time the people who need the lower price can still access it, whereas the shopkeeper can still make the money to keep the shop running from those who can afford it.

Honestly, thinking that there should be fixed prices for everything, if you're a rich westerner going in, means you're trying to externalize the effort of setting a market clearing rate, and trying to piggy-back off of the locals. If it's at some multinational chain, then sure, don't have people haggle with you over the price of some McNuggets, but at a family owned business, if they can get an additional 20% of the price of the goods they might be doubling their profit margin, so why wouldn't they haggle?

> It benefits nobody, because that's the price the transaction would have happened at anyway.

But this is not true. Haggling is price discovery. Either way, I think this is mostly a cultural thing that's lost on a lot of westerners.

> Haggling is price discovery

True, but the discovery is made necessary by artificial opacity.

It does not benefit society as a whole and that's why shops are legally required to have transparent pricing in most countries.

...furthermore, it's heavily discriminatory.

> Haggling is price discovery

Yes, the issue is that the price does not need to be discovered. The seller knows the "real" price, and is just hopping to screw over the buyer.

> The seller knows the "real" price…

The seller knows the customary price, and the lowest price they would be willing to accept. The "real" price is whatever the buyer and seller agree on for a particular trade. Price discovery is an ongoing process which isn't finished just because you've determined an average price for past trades. The buyer isn't losing out unless there's actual fraud involved, even if they could have potentially negotiated a better price. And really, we're mostly talking about trades between individuals and small businesses (who may also be individuals)—why should all the surplus value represented by the difference between the highest and lowest prices acceptable to both parties go to the buyer, and not the seller?

I mean, why do coupons exist? They mail you stuff and you bring it to a store and the price is cheaper? Extra effort all around?

But price discrimination improves cashflow. And these merchants can do the same thing as haggling with less paper waste and on the spot.

It enables differential pricing, which is not zero sum.

Even if haggling is fun for you, it is still a big expenditure of time and effort that accomplishes nothing. There's simply no reason for it to exist.

Negotiating price is extremely common in corporate environments. If I had to guess what it accomplishes, I’d say building a relationship with your trading partner.

Many / most corporate negotiations are legitimately necessary because every contract being negotiated is unique. Negotiations allow both parties to set terms and come to an agreeable price when there is no preset price.

A market vendor who knows an apple should cost $2 but charges $5 in the hopes of screwing over a tourist is just an asshole. I can't imagine how that builds relationships.

How exactly would that "should" work if there just isn't a standard set price?

There is a standard price, or at least there could be. It would be trivial for the apple seller to calculate the average price he ends up negotiating, and setting that as the published, firm price.

That is what's frustrating about negotiating for commodities like food. The seller is taking advantage of information asymmetry. They know what the standard price is, and they hope that you don't. It's scummy.

It is different when there isn't a set price, i.e. if you are trying to buy a one of a kind item. In that case even in the Western world some negotiation would be acceptable, (buying an original painting from an artist, for example). But this does not justify having to haggle for everything you want to buy, every time.

> That is what's frustrating about negotiating for commodities like food.

While I generally agree with you, if you're buying fresh food at a market, such as the apples in your example, it isn't necessarily a commodity. Quality and size will vary from one item to the next; why must they all be the same price? Places where goods tend to be more standardized seem to rely less on haggling and more on sorting: you don't haggle over the price of an apple out of a mixed lot, you pay a set price for a certain grade of apple which has been separated out in advance.

You’re biased against the seller and even your example of “fair” price is arrived at after negotiations! Where would that come from if there is no haggling?

Even a published price is nothing more than a free option for buyers. It’s a ceiling. There’s nothing that prevents the seller from offering a lower unpublished price.

Builds relationships, can arrive at an optimal price, involves human contact.

It doesn't take that long either. There are positives even to things you deem useless.

I can't imagine how someone trying to overcharge me would help build a relationship between me and the seller.

>Builds relationships

I don't get this one.

Through the conversation, you learn the idiosyncrasies of the other person. In a culture where haggling is normal, their “style” gives you insight into their personality and how they might act in other scenarios. And it identifies you as an insider or outsider to the culture. At the very least, you’ve learned their name and face.

I also hate haggling, and since I’m not from a culture where it’s a norm I can’t use it to read deeper into a person. (Or them into me.) But it’s not too hard to imagine how it helps to build relationships.

in the west buying stuff usually requires no human interaction at all, even the cashiers are getting replaced by automatic checkout. But, on the other hand, you do need negotiation skills, be it in career, private live, or elsewhere. So maybe we all just need to do a year of backpacking and learn how to haggle

> in the west buying stuff usually requires no human interaction at all

And then you step foot in a car dealership, and you might as well be in a souk

yup, stuff like cars, or, god forbid, houses, are not only expensive AF, but the buying requires skills most people never had a chance to practice. fuck it, I'm cycling to save the planet and my nerves

100% agree with you, and I don't want anything resembling confrontation when I'm buying souvenirs on vacation.

Couldn't care less if its rude or polite or whatever.

Go ahead and haggle if its fun for you.

Just pay the initial asking price then?