What? I’ve yet to meet an American younger than my grandfather who haggles at all on anything.

Interesting, almost everyone that I talk to will negotiate on a car.

I’m also the kind of person to negotiate on lots of other things too. You can definitely save money on random things if you ask. Subscriptions for phone/tv/internet, electronics, furniture. Maybe not at ikea, but at a more local showroom

Bought a bike on Craigslist for less, too. In fact, as far as I know, everyone prices things on Craigslist higher than they actually think the thing as worth. Because they know the buyer will offer them less than they post.

I’m a young millennial.

It's pretty mixed among the people I know. Some will haggle, some will accept the offered price. I'm usually in the latter camp, though I might haggle for something like a Craigslist sale, as the cost/value of used goods is more subjective.

I'm a xennial, so a bit older than you. I continue to be skeptical that our arbitrary generations matter for all that much.

Craigslist is a special case. Big ticket items like cars are very, very special cases. Neither of them indicate anything about Americans' appetite for haggling in general. Personally I'd rather not.

If craigslist and big ticket items are special cases, what does it take to not qualify as a special case?

You can't think of any other major areas of the economy? What fraction, by item count (since prices are usually decided per item), of people's commercial activity do you think takes the form of buying used stuff from private sellers or buying cars/houses/boats/etc?

Well, no one haggles at McDonalds, or Kroger.

you should check out online marketplaces more.

It's not paying sticker price that's the issue; it's paying more than someone else. If everyone always had to pay sticker price, nobody would have a problem with it.

As someone growing up rebuilding cars with my da as an income, the automobile industry is an atrocity. Dealerships are a virus borne of a bygone era, now they're no more than concert ticket scalpers justifying their existence through a forgotten relic of bygone law being middlemen.