When I moved into my apartment, the place had been fully furnished by our landlord. Among other things, this included a cubboard full of cups: 4 coffee cups, 4 regular glass cups, and 4 tumblers. Over the course of ten months, however, we are left with just 1 tumbler, 1 regular glass cup, and 3 coffee cups. For 3 roommates with very little initiative to clean dishes (why bother when a maid comes once a week?), this really isn’t sufficient. While it seems I brought all sorts of unnecessary junk like plates, forks, and spoons, I only brought one cup. It was plastic and it lamely broke after about a month. We were going to need more cups.
The easy option would be to run to the Walmartesque store and buy some crappy paper-thin glasses for about 4000 kwacha ($1) each. While this satisfies my laziness criteria, it definitely doesn’t provide any opportunity to continue my lifelong quest of promoting bartering and negotiation. It’s just not very much fun to pay a set price, especially when the product you are buying is lame and boring like a glass cup. I decide that my cup purchasing is going to take place at the Sunday market where all of the street vendors try to sell their junk to tourists.
So, there is this dood at the market who makes these glasses out of wine bottles. They cut the bottles, polish the edges so that the tourists don’t cut their mouths, and then imprint a sketch of an animal on the side of the glass. I’ve obviously gotta have em, so I ask the guy how much for a set of 4. He quotes me 50,000 kwacha as the ‘real’ price, but he’ll discount them for 40,000. For the mathematically challenged, that’s 10,000 kwacha ($2.50) for each glass. That seems kinda steep for a used wine bottle with a hippo on the side, so I tell em he’s gonna have to go lower. He seems insistent on the 40,000 price so I decide I need to start trying to add things without increasing the price. I ask for 2 wine glasses and he tells me that’ll be 50,000. We’re going the wrong way.
After about 10 minutes, I tell him I am going to run to the grocery store and I’ll think about it. He asks me if I’m going to come back and I tell him probably not. We continue this useless exchange where I want all 6 glasses for 40 and he wants 50. He then gives me the opening I’ve been waiting for all of my life. He asks if I’m going to buy him a drink at the grocery store. I obviously say yes, promising to buy him a Maheu (imagine corn meal combined with sugar combined with evaporated milk combined with vanilla flavoring for the bargain basement price of 2,000) if he’ll give me my price. Finally, he relents to my offer of 5 cups (I asked that he add another cup with a buffalo on the side to go along with the 4 hippos) and 2 wine glasses for 50,000 kwacha and a Maheu.
In retrospect, I may not be getting that great of a deal. After all, I just paid $15 for 7 glasses. But, seriously, I’m just giddy that I have another instance where I’ve purchased something with food AND I’ve become intertwined in the ‘alki who drinks too much and donates wine bottles – street vendor who cuts them – and expatriate who spends too much buying them ‘ chain.
The easy option would be to run to the Walmartesque store and buy some crappy paper-thin glasses for about 4000 kwacha ($1) each. While this satisfies my laziness criteria, it definitely doesn’t provide any opportunity to continue my lifelong quest of promoting bartering and negotiation. It’s just not very much fun to pay a set price, especially when the product you are buying is lame and boring like a glass cup. I decide that my cup purchasing is going to take place at the Sunday market where all of the street vendors try to sell their junk to tourists.
So, there is this dood at the market who makes these glasses out of wine bottles. They cut the bottles, polish the edges so that the tourists don’t cut their mouths, and then imprint a sketch of an animal on the side of the glass. I’ve obviously gotta have em, so I ask the guy how much for a set of 4. He quotes me 50,000 kwacha as the ‘real’ price, but he’ll discount them for 40,000. For the mathematically challenged, that’s 10,000 kwacha ($2.50) for each glass. That seems kinda steep for a used wine bottle with a hippo on the side, so I tell em he’s gonna have to go lower. He seems insistent on the 40,000 price so I decide I need to start trying to add things without increasing the price. I ask for 2 wine glasses and he tells me that’ll be 50,000. We’re going the wrong way.
After about 10 minutes, I tell him I am going to run to the grocery store and I’ll think about it. He asks me if I’m going to come back and I tell him probably not. We continue this useless exchange where I want all 6 glasses for 40 and he wants 50. He then gives me the opening I’ve been waiting for all of my life. He asks if I’m going to buy him a drink at the grocery store. I obviously say yes, promising to buy him a Maheu (imagine corn meal combined with sugar combined with evaporated milk combined with vanilla flavoring for the bargain basement price of 2,000) if he’ll give me my price. Finally, he relents to my offer of 5 cups (I asked that he add another cup with a buffalo on the side to go along with the 4 hippos) and 2 wine glasses for 50,000 kwacha and a Maheu.
In retrospect, I may not be getting that great of a deal. After all, I just paid $15 for 7 glasses. But, seriously, I’m just giddy that I have another instance where I’ve purchased something with food AND I’ve become intertwined in the ‘alki who drinks too much and donates wine bottles – street vendor who cuts them – and expatriate who spends too much buying them ‘ chain.
2 comments:
You, my friend, are a bartering genius!!
You, my friend, are a bartering genius!!
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