The recession has been a huge disappointment to me. It’s the lack of haggling I find so hard to come to terms with. When the great financial crisis began we were told we were going to get all sorts of eye-watering bargains. Everything was negotiable, it was said. Even the cheese counter at the supermarket was doing dodgy deals on Stilton. If you offered the man on the fish counter a fiver, he’d slip you an entire cod.
What nonsense. There is no haggling. I haven’t found a single shop that has been prepared to have any of it. I tried it in Zara with a black dress with a hole in the seam. ‘I’ll give you £60 for it,’ I said firmly.
‘I’m afraid this dress costs £80, madam.’
‘Yes, but there’s a hole in it so…’ I winked… ‘Let’s call it £60 and I’ll take it off your hands.’
‘The dress is £80, madam.’
‘What about the hole?’
‘You can stitch it.’
I said that if Zara wanted me to do needlework for them they could reduce the price. Brimming with attitude, she said, ‘If you don’t want to take the dress with a hole in it, madam, we will send it back to be stitched at our factory, then we will sell it. For the full price.’
‘There’s a recession on, you know,’ I said.
‘We don’t do reductions,’ she said, snatching the dress out of my hands as if she couldn’t possibly let someone of my questionable moral fibre hold it any longer. As Zara is an affordable high street fashion chain, I thought the problem might have been that I was aiming too low. Perhaps the bargains were to be had at the higher end of the market, where the margins are bigger.
So I tried it in Russell and Bromley with a pair of £250 boots. ‘I want a 10 per cent reduction,’ I told the sleek, polo-necked supermodel at the counter, pointing to a slight stain on the side of one boot. She squinted at them and said, as if holding her nose, ‘I can offer you ten pounds off. But you can’t return them.’ A 4 per cent reduction is more insulting than nothing. So I insisted on buying them at full price.
Perhaps, I thought, the haggling is to be done at retail parks where the chavs shop for widescreens. So I tried it at a Currys superstore. ‘I want to buy a top-of-the-range PC. What sort of deal can you do me?’ The sales assistant gawped blankly, then slowly wandered aimlessly about the store and finally, after much prompting from me in the direction of the area where he might find computers, showed me a Hewlett Packard costing £599 for just the base unit. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Throw in the screen, and some extras — let’s see, I’ll need Microsoft Word and Norton anti-virus — and that’s a deal.’
‘Microsoft Word is extra,’ he droned.
‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘I’m haggling, you see. You’re meant to say, “I can’t throw in Microsoft, but I’ll give you the screen and a free IT support package for a year.”’
‘The IT support package is extra. The screen is extra.’
I threatened not to buy it so he got his supervisor who tapped furiously at the cash register until it told him that he could, after all, give me the screen. ‘You’re lucky. We’re only doing this today,’ he announced proudly, and disappeared off to the storeroom. He was gone half an hour. When he came back he only had the base unit. ‘We don’t have any screens. But we’ll call you when they come in.’ Two months later I’m still waiting.
Perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree by haggling in towns, I thought. Perhaps I need to haggle in the country.
So this week I tried it at the saddlers. I offered to buy two saddles, one for each of my horses, egged on by a friend who declared, ‘They’ll bite your hand off.’ I picked out a nice brown one for Tara and a black one for Grace, both £950, and told them to come back to me with their best price for the pair. The next day the women called and said, ‘We can offer you £25 off each saddle.’
I felt like the character in the marketplace in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. I found myself actually saying, ‘Don’t you want to haggle? You know, I say, “£1,500 not a penny more,” and you say, “£1,800,” and I say, “£1,650,” and you say, “£1,700 final offer,” and I say, “Done!”’
There was an awkward silence before she explained that, no, she did not want to haggle. No one wants to haggle. So much for the recession.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
Comments