24 January - Sales Techniques

If a salesman in a foreign country offers you tea or a drink etc, he’s scammed you already or about to do so. So Stop! It’s not too late to negotiate prices. In his haste and pre-degustation of the money he’s made off you, he’s celebrating already, the five minutes you spend having tea, will give hm time to read you better and evaluate how naive you are. But as you may yet have to sing on credit card, calmly put the cup, or glass down, and say ‘Now that we appear to be friends… this pair of earrings you want to charge me $30 for… they’re really worth $5 right?'

This in light of a recent (and not the first) trip to India – but could equally have been in any African country, in the Middle East, or Mexico… or even London perhaps in a recession come to it. Am reminded of some expensive double glazing it took me ten years to pay off. Yes folks, it was not the double glazing that cost me so much money after all, but the ten year long finance agreement taken out at a ridiculous interest rate. Sure, even in those days there was some 15 or 30 day period to rescind the agreement signed if you’d bothered to do your sums, but I never bothered with it because… the guy who sold me the windows and the loan was jolly nice. He came from my neck of the woods and why would someone I could have gone to school with or sports practice with want to trick me? I mean, we’re sitting in my kitchen working out what we have in common over a glass of wine, which I have provided. How stupid was I? I should add that I was 26 at the time and a recent homeowner, so you'd think I were a bit wiser but no, I fell for it.

Between these occasions there is a gap of many years and the sums in question are different and yes, these earrings would still cost more in London than they do in India and I'm all for helping grease the local economy and I have a phobia of haggling, but if a kg of rice is approx 0.5p then surely a few beads and related man hours are not worth what I'm being asked to pay? The same goes for whatever end product you're being sold from rugs to furniture etc.

This is clearly a lesson not learnt yet as I only got him to knock down a paltry 10% and am not ecstatic to be wearing these earrings now as they are a visual reminder of this particular lesson I still have to learn.