This Story isn’t Worth a Dime over Two Dollars

Any school yard chum can tell you that other countries just don’t have the same standards for material value that Americans have. I have it on good authority that in every other country the world over (save perhaps England with all their dignity and whatnot), one could theoretically haggle down the price of just about anything. For example, a buddy of mine—fresh from a trip to Argentina—paid 20 Argentine Pesos (6.92 in real money) for Happiness. Imagine that, paying just under seven dollars for an abstract noun that would cost millions in the US… all because he haggled it down from 40,000 Argentine Pesos. Call us resolute. Call us greedy. Call us better. Whatever you call us (I generally just go with “better”), you can bet your bottom dollar (whatever the hell that means! If you’re more comfortable with betting your top or middle dollar, you’re welcome to. This, of course, presupposes that you, much like me, only have three) that Americans love knowing that we’re the best negotiators in the world.

Incidentally, foreigners the world over love knowing that Americans really believe they’re the best negotiators in the world. They, then, make it a point to dress meagerly and look as ignorant and pathetic as possible (in some cases). Prices are gouged to orders of magnitude what their actual retail value might be and silly tourists feel like nouveau conquistadors because they skimmed ten dollars from the ticket price. Everybody wins! I’m willing to bet that the vendors of Acapulco are only too eager to “negotiate” with an American tourist who took two years of Spanish in high school and is convinced, thereby, that he (more often than not, it’ll be a he) will impress native trinket vendors with his guile… in their native tongue. Golly, wait ‘til Sammy Suave gets back to the states and tells all his buddies about how he bargained himself a steal (in Spanish) on a porcelain salt shaker in the shape of a Mexican in a sombrero sleeping! Ay Dios mío, wait ‘til Pedro Peddlerez tells all his amigos about all the silly Americanos that paid $12 each for a little statues fashioned from old Chihuahua poo!

SIDEBAR: Souvenir Savvy
It seems that tourists have a tendency to buy the most ridiculously useless mementos they can find. Rarely will you buy anything that, in retrospect, you had any intention of keeping, ever could have imagined that you actually wanted or really believed the person you bought it for was going to like it. Vendors have caught on to this (probably via the Internet… where all real truth is born) and have become masters of selling tacky crap you don’t need. What’s worse than tourist actually buying these monuments of frivolity is the fact that tourist themselves probably generate the ideas for production. Do you really think a Mexican guy in an outlying province of Cancun came up with a drawing of two frogs wearing ponchos engaged in various acts of carnal appreciation with the words “Órale Cancún!” spelled across the top in order to represent Yucatan culture? What about a Spaniard who conceived a bottle opener shaped like a penis because that’s how they used to open bottles in the old country? Have Persian rugs really always had images of AK-47’s and tanks on them? Oh, you mean, that’s what Aladdin flew on? No. A number of tourists had gone in there and perused their selection of kitschy bottle openers before they reluctantly asked the store attendant if they had one more in the shape of, you know, a wee-wee. Preferably an American wee-wee.


Then, you get the professionals. Professional hagglers are tourists that are originally from whatever country they’re touring. They’re not necessarily visiting home as much as they’re showing their (now) American kids what the motherland is all about. This kind of haggling is not for the weak of character or expectant mothers; it can get brutal. My Nicaraguan father is among the best hagglers I’ve ever had the pleasure (and disgrace) of seeing in action. I can’t think of the last time he paid the original price when we’ve been in any Latin-American country (okay, so maybe we’re not Mexican… but the Mexicans don’t know that, so it’s close enough to being from that particular motherland). His haggling philosophy stems from essentially two things:
1) He understands that he very likely doesn’t want—and most certainly doesn’t need— whatever the hell he’ll end up buying.
2) They wouldn’t sell it to him if they weren’t making a profit, so there’s no point in feeling bad when the limping orphan walks (or sorta hops, I suppose) away with only 10 cents instead of the 25 she was asking for a packet of gum.

He’s ruthless. He’s unforgiving. And, it’s kinda cool to watch. First of all, my father has a mug that yells “I couldn’t possibly be less interested in whatever the hell you’re saying or selling” (I’ve tried to replicate it on my own haggling adventures, but I think my mug yells “I’m constipated and also perfectly ready to pay what you ask”). He’ll walk slowly past a street vendor (as an example) and wait for them to try to get his attention. “Señor, you want a nice gold bracelet?” they’d say.

My dad will stop, closely (but disinterestedly) inspect the bracelets and quickly assert that they aren’t real gold. He’ll take two or three steps before they call out to him that they are, in fact, real gold and that because he’s a paisano, they’ll give him a special price.

“Oh yeah?” he’ll say in Spanish… so it sounds more like “Ah-ha!?! Let’s see here, compadre, what you consider special.” The vendor will tell him a price and before the man finishes, he’ll interrupt him with “No, no, no… that’s the special you tell the gringos. They’ll buy your fake gold for any price. What’s the special price for real paisanos?”

The vendor, without fail, will reaffirm how special his price is and say that he actually charges gringos twice that much. My dad will look at the vendor, look down the street to where other vendors are presumably standing (waiting for him not to buy from the first vendor) and he’ll offer half of what he thinks the bracelet is actually worth. The vendor, stunned by such a ludicrously low offer, will talk about the quality of the bracelet and knock the price down from, say, $65 to $55.

“Nah. 15,” my dad will say.
“15!?! No, no, no… how about $50?”
“50! Only if you had a gun to my head! I’ll tell you what… $16”
“16!?! You’re out of your mind; this is real gold. People pay a lot more that 16 for these bracelets. I can’t believe I’m even saying this, how about $45?”
“Well, good luck finding someone who wants to pay $45, because I’m definitely not, amigo,” and then he’ll take another few steps away.
“Fine, fine, señor. You’re breaking my bank here, but you can have it for… $35”
“20… not a dime more”
“25! And I can’t go any lower”

My dad will pause, stroke his beard for a second, look back down the street towards the other eager vendors and say “14.”

“$14! You just said 20! You started at 15! No, there’s no way!”
“Yeah, and that’s what I wanted to pay then… you missed it. Look, compadre, I’m going to spend $14 on a crappy bracelet right now and I don’t care who I buy it from. If you don’t sell it to me, that guy will. If he doesn’t, the guy next to him will and you and your neighbor can complain about me being cheap while the other guy eats tacos and drinks beer. I don’t even want the damn bracelet.”
“Okay, señor, $20” the vendor will say exhaustedly.

My dad will grudgingly pull out a $20 bill, pay the man and look disappointed as he pockets the bracelet. He’ll then run to us and excitedly tell about working it down from $65. He’ll haggle just about anything and is usually fairly successfully. The skill he has that most people who engage in 30 minute haggling sessions can’t bring themselves to do is being capable of just walking away. Lots of people feel obligated to buy something since they spent so long banging out the price. No guilt for Old Man Ramirez… No, sir! If they didn’t want their time wasted, they shouldn’t have tried to overcharge.

Then there’s my cousin Beatrice; even my dad gets embarrassed when she gets into thrifty mode. Bea seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of not only what things are worth, but how much every other vendor in the world charges for them. This is the depth of her depravity. She won’t allow herself to buy something in a foreign country unless she’s firmly convinced that the seller is making just pennies. I don’t think it’s a matter of thrift and savings for her, because (again) no one ever really needs the crap you buy in other countries, it’s knowing that the vendor is kicking himself for letting it go at such a low price and having legitimately wasted so much time.

Bea’s been known to go to respectable restaurants in Mexico, order her meal, eat it and then haggle the price when the check is presented. Wow, we’d all think, this is absurd. Then we’re floored when it works. “Fuck ‘em,” she’d say, “every one of them is trying to rip you off.” We’re further impressed when she leaves a pitiful tip, “What? Do they think we’re a bunch of tourists?”

My dad would be the only one to regain hold of enough cognizance to say, “Bea, we ARE tourists. You’ve never even been here before!”

Never seems to bother her.

I, however, don’t seem to have the Ramirez family fervor for bargaining.

“Señor, you want to buy t-shirts with drawings of boobies that look like fruit?”
“Do I ever!” (in Spanish, of course)
“Three for $25.”
At this point, I like to cross my arms, look down the street towards other hopeful vendors, make the constipated face and say, “Can you break a hundred?”
“No, señor, sorry. I haven’t sold a shirt in two years.”
“Wow. That’s sad. I guess I better buy 12 then.”
“Are you interested in a coffee mug that looks like a booby?”
“Am I!”

That’s all.