As I wrote about last week, I was at a negotiation conference in Istanbul in which participants were given assignments to negotiate in the Spice Market.  Melissa Manwaring, who used to work with the Program on Negotiation and is now a professor at Babson College, came up with the great idea of each person from her group of five going into a shop and asking for the price of the same item to see if there were significant differences.  Think of this as the Ayres study on car dealerships done in Turkey over jewelry boxes. 

In Ian Ayres’ famous study of car dealerships in Chicago, it appeared that white men got the best (lowest) opening price for their cars, while black women got the worst opening bids.  In Melissa’s group, there was a wonderful mix of an older white male American (Howard Gadlin), Melissa herself (white female younger American), a young ethnic Chinese man (Andrew Lee), and two native Turkish speakers, so this was a great gender and ethnic mix to test.  

It turns out that this group found exactly the opposite of what Ayres found. 

I just returned from a conference in Istanbul, which was the second of three conferences on the next generation of negotiation teaching. It was fascinating; and I will have several posts in the next few days about different pieces of it. One of the most interesting concepts behind this conference was the opportunity to take advantage of the city itself, to take advantage of a negotiation culture completely unlike the US one, and to go into the Spice Market and Grand Bazaar to have some fun while learning about the negotiation culture here. I will have several stories from this experience. The first is my important negotiation for soccer jerseys for my boys. (I have for many years used soccer jerseys from around the world as the standard gift for my sons. In some places—France, Spain—this has led to classic department store purchases. In others—Italy, Bosnia, Croatia, Israel—this leads to bargaining with vendors in tourist squares.) I have a general process that I use for negotiation that I was curious to test again in Istanbul.

This week, Time Magazine had a great article on haggling during the recession. (Thanks to Jerry Olivo for sending this along.)  Although apparently we don’t usually negotiate retail items, the recession has encouraged plenty of shoppers to dust off those negotiation skills and try to negotiate items that are typically not open for discussion. 

Think you should haggle only when buying a car or shopping in the streets of Morocco? In this recession, if you’re not bargaining for everything everywhere, you’re needlessly draining your wallet. According to the consulting firm America’s Research Group, in October, 56% of consumers said they had recently tried to negotiate at retail outlets other than car dealerships. Of those hagglers, 50% got deals. When the company repeated the survey in May, 72% of consumers said they had tried to haggle, and a stunning 80% were successful. “What you can do today is unbelievable,” says Herb Cohen, an expert dealmaker and the author of the 1980 classic You Can Negotiate Anything. “Americans may finally learn that price tags weren’t put there by the big printer in the sky.”

It sounds like a perfect time for negotiation students everywhere to test those skills and ask for what you want.  As the article notes, you might start out feeling sheepish but will end up finding the process rather exhilarating.