| Comic Genius
OLYMPICS 2008Dave Barry: Haggling should be an Olympic sport
BY DAVE BARRY
At Beijing's famous Silk Market, you can get fabulous deals on popular action figures such as Fidel, Spider Man and Osama.
BEIJING -- If you're the kind of person who enjoys shopping and lying, you would love the Beijing Silk Market.The
Silk Market is a jam-packed, seven-story building, very popular with
tourists, where you can buy a LOT more than just silk, including
clothes, jewelry, luggage, watches, sunglasses, gadgets, knickknacks
and, for all I know, missile parts. These items are sold out of
1,700 tiny stalls manned by salespersons who apparently have been
drinking caffeinated coffee nonstop since 1993. You walk through
long, narrow, crowded aisles between the stalls, and at every stall you
pass, a salesperson, usually a woman, tries to lure you in via such
subtle sales techniques as grabbing your arm. If you respond by
displaying any interest at all -- and by ''displaying any interest,'' I
mean ''not walking briskly away'' -- the salesperson will thrust a
merchandise item into your hands and make the following points: 1.
The item is totally legitimate. If it's supposed to be a Prada purse,
it's a real Prada purse. If it's a painting of the Mona Lisa, it's the original Mona Lisa, by Leonardo Da Vinci, and not some cheap knockoff Mona Lisa such as the other vendors will try to sell you. 2.
You are getting a very special price. Even though the salesperson has
known you at this point for less than 15 seconds, she has taken a
powerful liking to you, so she has decided to give you a price so
ridiculously low, so totally crazy, that she will lose money on the
deal and be forced to leave the vendor business and become a homeless
person who must survive by selling personal bodily organs. That is how
much she likes you. What you're supposed to do then, according to
all the guide books, is bargain. Whatever price the salesperson gives
you, you're supposed to take her calculator and punch in a
counter-offer that is half or less. During the ensuing bargaining
process you're supposed to remain totally hard-nosed, if necessary
walking away with the salesperson pursuing you (which she will do). I
am terrible at this. Whatever opening price the salesperson gives me,
my impulse is to say: ''Well that sounds reasonable!'' Or: ''Are you
sure you're making enough on this?'' Somewhere in the basement of the
Silk Market, in the salespersons' lounge, they have my picture on the
wall with a sign that says, in Chinese, ``Do NOT let this man walk past
your stall! He paid $17,400 for a Batman pencil.'' On the other
hand, when my wife is in the Silk Market, she turns into Tony Soprano.
I watched her negotiate the purchase of a silk table runner and two
small stuffed pandas, and it was genuinely terrifying. (For the benefit
of men reading this, I should explain that a ''table runner'' is a
thing that you would never in one billion years think of purchasing.) My
wife spent 10 solid minutes going toe-to-toe with the stuffed-panda
salesperson, the two of them handing the calculator back and forth like
Olympic table-tennis champions, haggling intently over a difference of
approximately two dollars. My wife, who is usually a very honest
person, kept saying, with a straight face, things like, ''I have a very
specific budget for these.'' As if before we left for China we sat down
with our financial records and did a detailed spreadsheet analysis of
our stuffed-panda needs vs. resources, and we concluded that we could
go as high as $6.38 per panda, but if we went a penny over, the trip
was off. Anyway, my wife always got her price. If you ask me, she
should be placed in charge of the federal budget; the government would
spend WAY less money, and as a bonus it would have a nice supply of
silk table runners. But enough about shopping. Time for today's: OLYMPICS UPDATE: China
is still winning. The big heartbreak Wednesday was that their women's
gymnastics team beat ours, and in the spirit of Olympic harmony, I will
refrain from pointing out that, even though the minimum age in that
event is supposed to be 16, some of their women appeared to be more
like 7. Maybe the Chinese calculate ages in Celsius. Or maybe it's like
the Silk Market bargaining system, where the official minimum age is
viewed as merely an opening offer. In any event, I see no need to make
allegations of cheating, so let's just forget about this whole thing
and move on to today's: CORRECTION: In
yesterday's column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan
player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in
the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak,
Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I
got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted. |
