How to Haggle, there is no such thing as a firm price.
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.”
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