Haggling Happiness!

Haggling Happiness – Hey, this is like ‘hunting dogs’ and ‘flying planes’, which have the syntactic ambiguity (hunting dogs could mean both dogs that hunt and the act of hunting for dogs!).  'Haggling Happiness' is even different, as it can have one more meaning than just two – it’s not only about the happiness that haggles with one threatening to give the ‘miss’ or about one bargaining to buy happiness, but also about the happiness one gets through the act of haggling!   

We become awfully excited often to bargain while buying anything from the marketplace.   The high streets of Linking Road, Fashion Street, Ranganathan Street, OPH Road, Gariahat Market, Janpath, Khan Market, etc. are the havens (or should I say heavens?) of bargain hunting in India. 

Even some of the organized jewelry retail outfits in India (I worked for one of them recently!) are not able to think out of the box and get out of giving customers the opportunity to bargain, strongly fearing loss of sales. Except ‘truly’ organized retailers like Tanishq, others even quote prices in different levels – Quote 1, Quote 2, Quote 3, etc. The smarter customers with the skill and capability to push retailers down to Quote 3, could always emerge as winners! Repeated efforts to convince store personnel (and even the top brass) about the long-term benefit of having fixed price (that would lead to having a positive quality fix in the minds of customers) could often go futile. 

I feel sorry for customers who visit stores that encourage bargaining – different customers may get the same merchandise and services at different prices!  If a store encourages bargaining, as it cannot go below its planned margins, its pricing structure is undoubtedly an unhealthy one.   As long as customers enjoy the act of bargaining, trying to have the satisfaction of having ‘won’ a bargain, retailers too may encourage haggling in their stores.

The price of petrol in India has been hiked by a whopping Rs.7.50 per litre since yesterday and the subsequent ‘morchas’ and ‘hartals’ by the public and the opposition parties may bring it down by a few rupees soon.  After all it’s haggling of a different kind that works well with the masses! 

But, retailing in India should become a transparent affair – of course, even unlike an English expression of syntactic ambiguity!!!

- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani