National retail chains such as Macy’s and Lowes say that they maintain strictly set prices on the goods they sell. But that doesn’t stop stories from spreading about sales staffers who are willing to drop prices when customers ask. Even if haggling your way to a discount is the exception to the rule, there’s no harm done in asking for a deal—which is exactly what a lot of consumers are doing nowadays.
A Chicago Tribune story cites a Consumer Reports survey that indicates the number of hagglers is increasing, and for good reason: Bargaining works.
The survey found that hagglers had success rates topping 75 percent when they tried to negotiate lower prices on hotels, cell phone plans, clothing, jewelry and appliances. Consumers who said they bargained for lower medical bills were successful about 58 percent of the time.
Hard-core hagglers tend to be younger, according to the Consumer Reports survey, which found that 37 percent of those younger than 35 said they “always or often asked for discounts.”
Inspired partly by the Consumer Reports revelations, a Washington Post writer dedicated himself to a week of intense haggling and saved $730 not long ago.
For obvious reasons, big stores prefer to maintain official no-haggling policies. They don’t want shoppers to know that there are clerks and managers who have the power and inclination to knock prices down. Retail spokespeople tend to play down the upside to consumer haggling, if they acknowledge that it exists at all. From the Trib story, which describes a few examples of successful bargaining ventures:
A spokeswoman for Macy’s, where Oza got the deal on a food processor, said the department store has a firm no-haggling policy. A spokeswoman for Lowe’s, where Schmidt got an extra $50 off that vanity, said store managers shouldn’t haggle, but they can adjust prices for one-of-a-kind, clearance items.
Dan Butler, the vice president of retail operations for the National Retail Federation, doesn’t think there has been a significant jump in haggling at national chain stores.
“I don’t doubt that many consumers think they’ve negotiated better deals, but we tend to remember the exceptions, not the rule,” Butler said.
Haggling is bad for business, Butler adds, because it exposes retailers to charges that they favor some customers over others, which could lead to lawsuits or fines from that states with truth-in-pricing laws.
Butler suspects that consumers who think they’ve successfully haggled were simply clued in to unadvertised sales or given a discount that, a day or two later, would be available to all customers.
Sounds like a mighty convenient explanation. Even if that is the real reason these consumers were successful in snagging discounts, it’s a confirmation that there is indeed a potential payoff for asking for a deal. What is haggling if not a request for an unadvertised sale?
Related Posts:
A Blogger’s Year of Getting Discounts Just By Asking for Them
The New Age of Haggling: Why Pay Retail When Almost Everything’s Negotiable?