Negotiation, Haggling for Hot Dogs
Here is an amusing article about negotiation brought to you by Tom Chiarella, who is a a great current writer at Esquire magazine. I couldn’t find any more information about him, but here is a listing of his current articles http://www.esquire.com/search/fast_search?search_query=author:%22Tom%20Chiarella%22 .
And Tom Chiarella if you end up reading this please send me your bio so I can give you credit for your insightful article.
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http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0205NEGO_114_1
Buying a hot dog is an essential, unquestionable transaction, the lowest common denominator of American commerce. The sale of a hot dog delivers about the same amount of marginal satisfaction to the buyer, who gets — by my reckoning — about 40 cents worth of food, heated and assembled nicely for $1.75, and to the vendor, who makes something like $1.35 for three moves — unfolding a bun, tonging a hot dog, and splashing on some relish. No sales, no specials, no markdowns. Day in, day out, clear and glorious. No one screws anyone. The emptor is plenty caveat.
That’s why I wanted a deal.
I’ve always understood that certain transactions are designed to be pushed back and forth, made with the expectation of counteroffer, laid on the table in order to be hashed out for weeks or bickered over for mere minutes in the halo of a streetlight. I like getting my price, something that acknowledges my end, makes me feel my business is appreciated. In my time I’ve struck deals with landlords, car mechanics, electricians, house painters, cable guys, real estate agents, drug dealers, with bullies, bosses, pimps, pit bosses, and local politicians. These people expect no less; negotiation is their creed. But I wanted to test myself.
What if I opened every transaction to a haggle? What if I made my own bid on a TiVo? A counteroffer on dry cleaning? What if I treated the list price for a dress shirt as merely a suggestion? Could I insert myself into every transaction so that price wasn’t so much of an absolute? I wanted to know. For three months, I would haggle everything that came my way, insisting to everyone who would listen that price was a fluid force, a matter of argument.
And I started with a hot dog.
The vendor was working a cart on the corner of Forty-seventh and Broadway, across from the Edison Hotel in Manhattan. I stood in a nearby Starbucks and watched as he rolled the cart into place and laid out his garnishes before I approached.
I ordered my dog — his first sale of the day, I knew. He poked around in his vat and drew one out. Younger than I, this was a man working without thinking, without even looking my way. I decided on the direct approach, no bullshit, to make him snap to, just to see what it would get me.
“Any chance you’d knock a buck off that price?” I said. He stared at me so hard, I couldn’t focus on the city moving behind him. “First dog of the day?” I said. “You know, special sale?” He held the hot dog over its bun as if the next thing I said might make it drop.
“First what?” he said, not looking pleased.
“You know,” I said. “First-hot-dog special.” He glared at me. “Jump-start things. It would be good,” I said, without being certain of any retail equation that supported the assertion, “for everybody.”
“Fuck no,” he said. He looked me up and down. “Why? You don’t have money?”
I shrugged. Of course I had money. He knew that much. There was a five-dollar bill pinched in my fingers even now. I crumpled it down, hoping he wouldn’t see. It had been perhaps twenty seconds since the deal was put on the table. I had made so many mistakes that I simply wanted to rewind time to the point where I was back in Starbucks, thinking I had everything figured out. I could see a new strategy, a new family of strategies, becoming clear to me. Open with a little banter. Leave the money in the pocket. Wait till the dog is in the bun.
I pointed to the hot dog. “It doesn’t look all that good,” I said, hoping, I guess, that he’d take a look at what he was offering the world — a mere hot dog — and capitulate.
“What?” he said. “It’s a hot dog.”
“Looks good to me,” the woman behind me said, holding out her money.
The hot-dog man looked at me then and slapped closed the lid to his cart. “No deals!” he snarled, wrapping the hot dog in paper with a twist and reaching past me to the woman.
She held up her hands. “Not without peppers on it.”
You gotta have rules. I decided early on that paying a salesman twenty dollars on the side so that I could get the floor model of a microwave was less a negotiation than a bribe. Years ago, I bought my best leather jacket in the West Village and got $150 off when I offered to pay cash. When I asked the Russian salesclerk how that worked, why cash was so king, he shrugged. “We will mark the coat as stolen,” he said. “It is very simple. Boss will not care.” More like a felony than a negotiation, really.
And as I learned after the hot-dog incident, you gotta have a plan. Particularly when your next task is to haggle the single most inarguable, unapproachable price in this great republic, a price flashed on the streets, a price seemingly outside the influence of anyone — prince, pauper, and, as evidenced these last four years, president alike: the price of a gallon of gas.
This time, I did my homework. After driving past just about every station in my hometown in Indiana, and then most of the county, recording prices, noting locations, I headed straight to the most expensive station and parked in front of a pump.
I shouldered my way in the door, bells ajangle, announcing to the two clerks that I was ready to rumble. “Is that price firm?” I asked, hooking a thumb over my shoulder toward the pumps.
The clerk behind the counter deadeyed me. I was certain no one had ever asked her this before, but to use the word slack-jawed would be to understate her lack of interest. “What price?” she said.
“Gas. A gallon of gas. It seems high.”
She looked at my car, then back at me, sighed deeply, then leaned forward on her large bosom. “We can’t do nothing about that.”
I’d expected resistance. I had worked out my own special move for this occasion. I whipped out a Polaroid of the price a mere eighteen miles away. “Ten cents cheaper,” I said softly. “Just down the highway. Today.” My coup de grâce! My hand was visible in the shot, holding a copy of that day’s newspaper, fuzzy and unrecognizable.
She perked up then, passed the picture to the other clerk, and laughed a little. “Well,” she said, “it’s worth the drive.”
I sagged. “Are you saying you can’t knock off even five cents a gallon?”
She looked at me then, straight in the eyes. “Honey,” she said, “I’m just saying I’ll drive over tonight and fill up my own self.”
I was a little embarrassed. Worse, I really needed gas. So I slapped a five on the counter and said no more.
It was clear that I needed help. There are, of course, real professionals who can teach you to haggle. Universities now offer advanced degrees in mediation and conflict resolution. On multiple shelves at the larger bookstores there exists an entirely approachable literature of negotiation. Throw a rock. Hit an expert.
I chose to start at the top, training with the Godfather of Negotiation, Herb Cohen, author of You Can Negotiate Anything, a seminal classic of empowerment lit, and the recent Negotiate This! He’s got the requisite experience, having served as a consultant in the Iran hostage crisis and the NFL players strike, taught at Harvard and the FBI Academy, counseled Carter and Reagan alike. I journeyed to his Watergate apartment in search of help.
He sat before me, an old Jewish guy in a plain white T-shirt and short gym shorts, sitting surprisingly far back in his Barcalounger, sipping iced tea. It was like sitting at the feet of the master. Literally. From my perspective I could see mostly the bottoms of his shoes. He had recently stepped in gum.
“What people don’t understand is that a price itself is a kind of negotiating point,” he says, snapping through my all-day session in fast-forward. “They’re just making you an offer. In some ways, a price is a disadvantage to the seller, because if the sign says $99, the buyer might think it’s a steal. He might have been willing to pay $129. And the seller doesn’t get a chance at that extra $30.”
Exactly! I tell him about my pitch for the gallon of gas.
“Those women don’t care where you buy your gas. They don’t have any stake in it,” he says. “You have to speak to the right people — the people with the power to make changes. Besides, you didn’t offer them anything.”
How’s that?
“You’re offering them less money,” he says, “without giving them anything in return.” He holds a finger straight up in the air and wags it at me. “You always have something to offer. Loyalty. Future business. Increased volume. Whatever. You have to think about their needs. You have to create an offer that gives something rather than takes it away.”
After a couple hours of this, he wants lunch, and I offer to buy. His wife comes in as he stands. “You’re not going anywhere in those shorts,” she says.
Cohen looks at me, hands out, palms up. “You’re not buying lunch.” Then he looks at his wife. “I’ll put on a coat.”
“A coat!” she says. “Those are gym shorts!”
“They look fine,” Cohen says.
“They do not look fine,” she says. “They look awful, Herb.”
He points at me. “You aren’t buying lunch.”
“There is no lunch,” his wife says, “if you don’t change those shorts.”
Cohen concedes. I concede. Some things can’t be negotiated.
I am not a friendly person by nature. I am willing to make small talk, but only on select days. When the sun shines, when the hormones flow the right way. Other than that, I’m gruff and disinterested, a little demanding, and bored silly by empty chatter. But after speaking to Herb, I sought out and bonded with the stoned salesman at Best Buy and asked after the children in the clerk’s photo badge at Wal-Mart. “Humanize yourself,” Herb had told me. “Make them understand your life before you make an offer.”
So it was that while haggling over an eighty-hour TiVo at Circuit City, I blurted out, “It’s for my son!” And, realizing that that made me about as remarkable as a sneeze, I added, without thinking, “He’s narcoleptic!” A complete lie. First, I already have a forty-hour TiVo. Furthermore, my son is no narcoleptic. In point of fact, he might even be encouraged to watch a little less television. But I spun out a tale of a boy who needed to rewind television when he woke up from his sudden fits of sleep. It was all very sad, but we had learned to cope. The salesman called the manager. The manager told me there had been a kid like that in his French class in high school. I might need a bigger memory cache if my son slept more than thirty minutes at a pop. He made suggestions. “Does he fall asleep during sports, too?” he asked earnestly. Then he gave me a price, sixty dollars below list. I thanked him, told him I needed to talk to my ex-wife, then took the price and drove across the street to Best Buy, where I got them to knock off another twenty bucks.
I started using other strategies, too. Every time I stood at a counter, every time I stared into another pimply face, every time I set my purchase on the flat space between, I held up what I was buying as if I weren’t all that sure I wanted it. When I asked if a price on a tube of Crest was firm, I was met with the blankness that only a haggler knows. But I found that if you ask the right questions, there are deals to be had. I got 20 percent off a two-liter of Popov at CVS when I learned — simply by asking — of a sale that hadn’t happened yet, from a clerk I bonded with who seemed to feel that I had somehow missed an opportunity that was still six days away.
Within weeks I discovered that restaurants will typically give you four desserts for the price of three if you ask for a sampler. That a draft beer is generally good for a free refill with a little prodding. That you can get an extra 20 percent off at Ikea by pressing past the cashiers, past the floor salespeople, up into the bottommost managerial rungs, by comparing the price of one perfectly well priced dresser with its slightly less well priced but better-sized counterpart one floor down.
I was pleased with my success so far, but I wanted a bigger test, something with a whiff of exclusivity. So I decided to have a dress shirt made at Nordstrom. From the moment they laid the cloth over my shoulders, I began to discuss the pleasure of having a shirt that fit right. “Every man should have a custom shirt,” I said, standing in the cozy, paneled fitting room, cup of warm tea steaming by the mirror. “It seems more like a right than a privilege.” The tailor, pins fanned in mouth, concurred by humming. The salesman nodded, adding that he had three.
“Three is a start!” I said. “I’d like one for every day of the week.”
“That’s my goal, too,” he said.
“You should make me a package deal,” I said. “Give me a better price and sell me a week’s worth.”
A passing sales manager told me the price was firm, that the shirts never went on sale.
“Never?” I said. “You never make deals?”
“Rarely,” he sniffed.
That was my crack. “Rarely?” I said. “Or never?” He sighed then, having opened the door that little bit. I held out my hand and introduced myself. “I’m Tom,” I said, not having the heart to tell him I’m the guy who can always outwait a salesman. I was giving him something, I told him. I was selling him an idea: a week’s worth of shirts. I could see that he liked the concept. “Consider me your word of mouth,” I added. We settled at buy four, get one free.
Rarely, my ass!
Negotiation can be a fairly inexact science. You often end up with more than you want, or less, or something else entirely. I had wanted only one shirt, especially at $129. Now I was looking at five. But I would have a week’s worth, and, more than that, I’d made myself a deal. Try that on an off-the-rack shirt and they’ll probably tell you to wait for it to go on sale. But when you’re dealing with a product built on service, the price hangs in the air in front you. You bat at it a little and you can knock it down.
Take my front lawn. I didn’t particularly want it aerated, but when I saw a worker plugging my neighbor’s yard, it looked like the smart thing to do. Especially if I could get my price. I approached the lawn guy and peppered him with questions. What were the benefits? Breaking up the roots, loosening the soil, blah, blah, blah. I listened intently, without any interest — other than getting a better price than my neighbor. I asked him again and again, until it seemed he had a stake in this, that it was an argument he wanted to win. This was part of Herb’s strategy, too — allowing others the space to tell their story.
“Since you’re here,” I finally said, “could you give my lawn a quick once-over?”
“Once-over,” he said. “You mean free?”
Eventually he agreed to do what he called a seventy-five-dollar job for twenty dollars — if he didn’t have to do the hill in back and if I agreed to a winterizing contract. Only later did I realize the guy had locked me in to a $240 commitment for about thirty minutes of hard labor. It was, at best, a murky victory.
Beware of the counteroffer. That was the lesson there. And so I added it to the list I was developing, my own personal rules for negotiating. Never let them know how much you have to spend. Draw people into your life. Show your personality. Learn people’s names. Work your way up to the person who has a stake in the sale and the power to make a deal.
First among these rules was Cohen’s advice not to think of money as the only thing I had to offer. I found that trading favors proved relatively easy. I negotiated with the local street sweeper to make three passes in front of my house in exchange for calling my neighbors and having them move their cars. I got my coffee at the local diner in exchange for always parking in the lot of the liquor store across the street. I cut my dry-cleaning bill in half in exchange for returning two hundred wire hangers that had built up in my closet.
I began to stand around and think over the possibilities of a transaction before I leapt in. I would scratch my chin. The cashier might look at me then and query, “What can I do for you?” At times like this, I would look for openings.
I bought candy on the cheap at the dollar store by making an offer ten minutes before it closed on Halloween. “I’ll give you ten bucks for what’s left,” I told the manager, who jingled her keys nervously.
“It’s a dollar store,” she said. “And that’s a lot of bags.”
I reached into the bin and counted. “Thirty-one,” I said. “I’ll clean you right out. No leftovers.”
She laughed and looked out the window. She was, I realized, like most people, a prisoner of her job. She had places to go, children in costumes. “I’ll bag it up,” I said, reaching into the bin.
“Okay,” she said. “But only if you help me take that bin to the back before you leave.” Gladly, I told her. Now she was talking my language.
These things fill your head. The smallest triumphs. The tiniest beats. Quarters add up. Dollars. Deals. And soon you don’t look at a sticker price as anything more than a warning sign in the road. Curve ahead. Dip. Yield.
Then came the moment when the lessons, long since internalized in the process of negotiating everything from a plate of ribs to a gross of no. 2 pencils, came together and saved me no small measure of cash, heartache, and aggravation. When the process of negotiating was less an exercise than a necessity.
I was on vacation when I took it upon myself to go swimming with the keys to my rental car in my pocket. I lolled in the waves for half an hour or so before I realized that I’d lost the keys, like a damned fool. We were renting a house on an isolated beach in south Florida. It was Saturday night.
When I called the roadside-assistance hotline and gave them the news of the keys, the woman gave a deep sigh. “That can be expensive,” she said. I took a deep breath myself. We both knew what we were getting into. A negotiation was about to commence. By this point, I was interested in just this kind of fight.
I knew right where to begin. “What’s your name?” I said.
“Darnita,” she said.
“Well, give me the worst-case scenario, Darnita. Just hit me straight between the eyes with it.” I wanted her to feel what I was facing.
She laughed. “Well, it’s a transponder key, which means it can’t be reproduced, so the car will have to be towed into a dealer on Monday. If they can make you a key — if — well, it’s going to cost a lot.”
“How much, Darnita?” I said.
“I hate saying this, but we had a Camry last week that billed out at $1,200 for a new key.”
Once I would have panicked. Once I would have allowed the anger to rise in my throat. I would have told her she was fucking crazy if she thought I’d pay $1,200 for a car key. But now I simply leaned back. I knew what I had to do. It would take me some time, but I decided in those first moments that I would flip this whole thing. I had the tools.
“Darnita, put yourself in my shoes,” I said. “I’m on vacation, and my rental-car company doesn’t have the sense to save an extra set of keys. I’m thirty miles from town, with four children and little food, and I don’t have a car until Monday. I mean, you can imagine the kind of panic I’m in, can’t you?”
“Oh, Lord,” she said. “We’ll have to do something.”
They replaced the car that night, even reimbursing me for a hundred-dollar cab ride. When they didn’t show, twice, to tow the other car, I used that against them. I’d call again; I’d tell it all in order with dates and times, the inconveniences. I would push past Darnita to her supervisors, to the regional manager, upward, ever upward. I would draw the picture for each of them. Me: silly but not selfish, having made an innocent mistake. Them: duty bound but helpful, able to, darn it, reach out to this one guy and offer him a break. I’d tell the story again and again, amplifying the suffering, downplaying the fault, subtly shifting my annoyance from my own carelessness to the stiff corporate response they mustered. I’d keep the anger to a minimum. I’d make them laugh. Darnita, Chantelle, Marilyn, Brent, David F., Steve. Up and up the line I went, giving each a picture of a vacation being stolen from me, and eventually I came to convince them it was their fault.
Finally, on the fourth day, I got a call from the regional manager in Tampa. “Look, Tom,” she said, after I greeted her by name. “We know this has been a nightmare for you. I’m just sorry it ever happened. We’re comping the rental for you, and we’ll be down to pick up the car later today.”
“And the keys?”
“Forget it,” she said. “We’ll take care of it. You’ve been more than patient. Everybody here says you’ve been terrific.” I found myself silent. But what transpired next surprised me most of all.
“We just want to say,” she pressed on, “thank you.”
Last week I was walking my dog in the large city near my town, in the hours before my son’s football game. I leaned back and dozed on the marble steps of a war memorial, enjoying the last bit of sunshine for the season. At one point, I opened my eyes and there was a man selling hot dogs on the sidewalk below.
So I stood. A hot dog was oddly appealing to me just then. The cart was loaded with fresh chopped onions, a warm tin of chili, a pile of shredded cheese. I approached and offered my money. He handed me my hot dog.
For one moment, I thought about making an offer on a second one. But I heard the words of the master, telling me to let it go. “Is screwing a working guy out of seventy-five cents really worth the time?” Herb had asked me during our session. “What’s the hourly rate there?” So I started slathering on the mustard instead.
“I’ve got something for you,” the vendor said, and when I turned to look, he was holding a hot dog.
I smiled and shook my head. “I’m good,” I said. “No thanks.”
But he was holding it out for my dog, who wolfed it out of his hands without pause. I laughed. The man seemed happy; the dog, ecstatic. Why not? It’s what I had been saying from the start. A free hot dog? That’s a good deal for all.
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