Hi there guys, today I wanted to talk about a man I met way back in 2000. This was the awful period when I failed to get a decent job upon leaving university. I only had myself to blame of course - I went to one of the top universities in the UK on a scholarship and thus I assumed I was just going to waltz out of university when I graduated in 2000 and get a great job. I applied for what I thought would be my dream job and assumed that the company would be insane not to hire me given my skills were a great match for what they were looking for. I went through the entire recruitment process with them only to be rejected at the end of it. Thus in desperation, I started applying for a variety of jobs, but it was just rejection after rejection. I got so desperate to get some work experience that I did some pretty terrible jobs - some were worse than others and there was one that was so horrible I quit after just two hours which I will share with you now. I was selling makeovers in a mall and paired up with this Pakistani guy Ali (not his real name) who pretended to be very gay (in a very camp manner) so he could speak to the women in our target audience. Ali's logic was that most women don't like to talk to straight men who are complete strangers but they didn't view gay men as a threat as we're not sexually interested in women. This makeover package would include everything from some cosmetics, beauty treatments (like waxing, facials, manicures etc) and other products like shampoo, scented soaps and perfumes. Ali would say, "if you bought all these separately, that whole bundle would cost you well over £350 but just because you're my new best friend darling, you can have all of these amazing goodies for just £179 - this incredible bargain is only available today as it is our last day here."
Ali made a commission of about £15 for each sale he made (less if he offered the customer a small discount) and he wasn't paid a basic so if he didn't sell he didn't earn. Most of the women balked at the £179 he was asking for - it wasn't like a cheap product that one would impulse buy after trying at the mall. Many of his customers would talk to him for quite a while because Ali knew how to charm them and engage them but then they would simply walk away without buying. Thus he didn't make a single sale in those two hours and I felt like the whole situation was just so strange. Why did they hire a man (instead of a woman) to try to sell this product to women and why was he pretending to be gay just to be able to approach his clients? I made an excuse to go to the toilet, then when I was at the toilet, I stared into the mirror and thought, what the hell am I doing with my life? That was when I decided to quit and Ali wasn't impressed, he told me that I was giving up way too easily - he claimed that there were days that he had women lining up to buy from him and he was able to make a very good living doing this. He then said, "but I can see that you've made up your mind so please, it's okay - just go. I've got to get back to work now." That was 22 years ago and I do wonder what Ali is doing today. He would be even older than me now, he'd be in his early 50s at least and I wonder if he would still be at the shopping mall trying to sell stuff to strangers or if he had managed to move onto better things? Don't get me wrong - Ali was like a market trader selling goods to the public but it was simply not for me, it was also not what I wanted to do with my career.
If you think that job with Ali was bad, well I can admit that I did another ten or so jobs (bear in mind I barely lasted two hours with Ali before I gave up and quit) which were equally horrific and poorly paid before I managed to land my first job - oh admittedly, that was an equally terrible job but at least I was paid a monthly salary and had some form of financial stability. I then moved from that job to a less terrible job but each time I changed jobs, I was able to get myself into a better position until today, I am commanding salary that is way above average for a man my age despite having had a terrible start to my working life. I didn't take the usual route - you see, most people who went to top universities would usually go join some graduate recruitment programme and then work their way up the corporate ladder whereas I was so freaking clueless after my graduation I had no idea how to find a job. I ended up doing jobs that didn't require a degree at all and worked my way up from there by proving myself to be a great salesman. But in today's post I want to talk about Ali - I spent two hours with him 22 years ago but I still remember him well for one reason. There was such a huge contrast between our attitudes: I felt sorry for him as I thought he had a really awful job and he felt insulted by my sympathy. I think he was hoping for me to be impressed with him after having watched him in action and whilst I knew I could never ever do what he did, but at the same time, I wasn't impressed either. Ali told me that day that he had been doing that job for "a few years" and he was loving it, he really enjoyed his job; to be honest, I wasn't that convinced at all by that claim.
Ali was given mission impossible - he was given a product for women, where the target audience is women and given his physical appearance (Middle Eastern looking guy with a beard) approaching random women in the mall was always going to be very difficult. Yet somehow, he found a way for it to work by adopting this very camp and gay persona which made it possible for him to not only engage his customers but to make some sales as well. Ali definitely had some brains to solve a very tricky social situation at work but on the other hand, the businessman in me has to ask the question: well how much money are you making then Ali? Even if these women are talking to you, how many of them are actually buying? Are these the kind of women who would spend a lot of money pampering themselves? No, they are not because we were in a neighbourhood in South London where people are not that rich and these women were in the mall looking for bargains in the sales rather than spending huge amounts of money. Ali did try to capitalize on that by trying to convince his clients that by buying the makeover bundle, they were actually saving a lot of money but the price tag was way too high for a lot of his customers. Unfortunately for Ali, he couldn't just pack up and move to a mall in a more affluent part of central London, this was the mall he was assigned by the company that employed him and he didn't get a say in the matter. The malls which were in more affluent neighbourhoods were already assigned to their senior sales people and Ali had to wait for one of them to quit before he could get a better location - that was a very tough challenge for him and credit where credit is due, there were aspects of Ali's problem solving abilities that I found rather admirable.
Hence we have two sides to Ali's situation at the mall. On one hand, there are the good things we can focus on: his problem solving skills and ability to adapt to his situation in order to deliver good results. However, as a third party observing him at work, I also saw the many problems he faced. I also noticed that Ali took great pride in what he was doing and that's a double edged sword - this was evident when I decided to give up and quit after two hours, Ali got very defensive and asked me if I wanted to leave - he took it quite personally when I didn't like what he did. On one hand, I think Ali may have received some extra money for training someone like me but on the other hand, I felt he was so focused on being good at his job that he ignored all the things that were wrong about his situation that he shoved into his blind spot. There was this moment when he asked me, "tell me what's wrong with this job?" Oh I could have replied, "how much time do you have?" But no I avoided replying the question as I barely knew the guy - I had spent two hours with him and I never met him again. This was the not the conversation I wanted to have with him. There isn't a perfect job in the world, even in my current position, gosh - I am facing many problems and challenges but at least I am well paid whilst I deal with all of those issues. Was Ali completely oblivious to the problems he was facing at his job? It certainly felt that way when he tried to sell the job to me as the best thing in the world - was he trying to convince me to stay in that job or rather, was he trying to convince himself that he was doing extremely well there? Well I got the feeling that it was probably far more of the latter, as he didn't care what I thought - after all, why should he care? Ali had only just met me.
So allow me to ask a few difficult questions: was Ali good at his job? Yes he was. Was this a good job, did Ali have a good deal? No, it was a terrible job for the following reasons: he was on commission only so his employers had no risk, whilst Ali took on all the risk. If for whatever reason, say it rained heavily that day and the mall was deserted, then Ali's employers were not going to pay him a penny and that's not what good employers do. Good employers ought to go out of their way to take care of their staff rather than exploit them - there was an element of exploitation in Ali's case. Was Ali oblivious to that? Likewise, there was a huge element of luck in Ali's case, he told me once there was a hen party passing through the mall and he convinced the entire party - all ten of them - to purchase the makeover bundle and thus he made £150 in under an hour. He smugly claimed, "do doctors, lawyers and engineers make that much in an hour? I don't think so." And I thought, yeah how often does that happen? You just made a grand total of £0.00 in the last two hours, not £300. Even if Ali does make a sale, he's very unlikely to repeat customers who will come back and buy from him again. Furthermore he was pretending to be so gay in a way that no gay man would dare to - as a gay man, I tend to be quite reserved and avoid flaunting my sexuality in public spaces because I don't want trouble. Perhaps as a straight man pretending to be gay, he doesn't worry about this the same way I do but that amount of risk he was willing to take left me feeling uneasy. And where's the career progression? I certainly couldn't see any career progression for Ali there.
Allow me to use a totally weird analogy from amongst my friends from gymnastics: so this friend recently went viral on Youtube for his whistling videos. He is a stunningly good whistler and for a laugh, he recorded himself and put it on Youtube. Nothing much happened for a few weeks and then suddenly it just went viral. He started getting thousands and thousands of views on all his Youtube videos, so he put out a few more videos and pretty soon, they got plenty of hits too. Was my friend great at whistling? Yeah, undoubtedly so but was he able to make a living from making Youtube videos of his whistling? No, he still has a proper job that pays the bills - whilst he was very flattered by the attention he was getting online, he still stuck to his proper career. Just because you're good at something (such as whistling) doesn't mean that you should make it your career. Likewise, in the case of Ali, sure he was very convincing as a gay man when he was trying to sell those makeover packages, but should he make this routine his career? I did wonder if Ali was some kind of closet homosexual desperate to have a valid excuse to get in touch with his gay side, but he did tell me that he had a wife and a daughter, so he was working hard to support his family, to make sure that his daughter can have a great childhood. Even if Ali did have some good sales skills and was good at what he did, it was still a terrible job for him and he would have been better off using his sales skills in a more corporate environment. But could Ali see any of that? No, not at all! Ali just focused on the fact that he was rather good at his job whilst ignoring all these other problematic issues.
Looking at the broader issue, I see a lot of people out there who don't exactly have very good jobs, but nonetheless, make some kind of excuse to justify staying in their current jobs instead of looking for something better. Often they just focus on one aspect of the situation such as, "I really enjoy my job" or "I am very good at my job" whilst shoving all the other problems into a huge blind spot. The key question that these people need to ask is this: can you get a better job? Do you have the skills to get a better job? Are there better jobs out there which you can apply for and stand a realistic chance of getting? Are you going to be better off working somewhere else? I refer you to the Youtube video below about staff at Disneyland complaining how poorly paid they are and the lady featured in the video was an older lady who had spent her entire working life at Disneyland - so even if she left Disneyland, she would probably end up in some other lowly paid customer service role such as working in a hotel or restaurant given that she didn't have the skills nor the experience to access a better job. So with that in mind, staying at Disneyland and fighting for better wages made sense as leaving Disneyland would mean working an equally poorly paid job in a less 'fun' environment. However, I did think that Ali did have some great skills as a salesman, he could perform well with a better product, in a better company. There was really nothing to stop Ali from looking for a much better job, given that he did have the talent and skills to do just that; Ali's situation is totally different from that older American lady working at Disneyland, who sadly had very limited options.
Anyway, so that's it from me on this story. I was going to expand the discussion more broadly on the theme of people who find excuses to justify staying in a terrible job, but I thought the story of Ali was just so unusual and interesting that I decided to make this post just about him. I do wish him well, I hope he is doing a better job today though honestly, I have absolutely no idea where he is today - I spent two hours with him way back in 2000 and never ever saw him again. What do you think? Have you ever met anyone like Ali before? Have you ever met a straight man who pretended to be gay? What about people who are clearly in a terrible job but get quite defensive about why they choose to stick with that job? Could you do Ali's job and sell stuff to strangers in a mall? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.
I think Ali is simply trying to use almost every advantage he can to perform a job he knows deep down doesn't have much reward. I think in the past you blogged about trying to get a job for the sister of one of your good friends, and she spent way too much time focusing on preparing her resume when it would have had very little effect. Sometimes people want to believe their efforts matter to maintain the illusion of control, even if in reality their efforts have little effect. It's the human mind trying to stay sane and not become too hopeless haha.
ReplyDeleteHi Amanda, Ali had a tough job. How can a man like him sell a product where the target market is exclusively women? He has made the best of a difficult situation of course and credit to him for doing so, but he was taking all the risk and the reward wasn't much at all. It wasn't a good deal and he still insisted that it was. You're absolutely spot on in your analysis about people wishing to maintain the illusion of control even if in reality these efforts have little or not effect at all - so in Ali's case, I think too much is based on luck. He got lucky that day when he told me about a group of women on a hen party being in a good mood and all ten of them bought from him. But say if we get a rainy day and far fewer people turn up at the mall, then through no fault of his own, he would be facing a much tougher day with far fewer potential customers to sell to. Gosh, it's not even as if he has a proper shop and he can present his goods - he is literally standing in the mall with a tiny table, that's it. It is pretty grim, yet he got so defensive when I quit??
DeleteYup it's hard to believe that the odds are stacked against you and to ask the dealer for a new hand. I think even if he was a woman he would still find it hard, like you said he wasn't stationed at a mall with plenty of rich women who could afford his products. He got defensive because he's simply shooting the messenger. If he did believe his prospects were grim it would hurt so much, and then he'd have to face the unknown of finding a new job.
DeleteOh yeah, even a woman like you would find it hard to do a job like that mostly because it involves going up to complete strangers. When we go shopping, we are quite used to entering a shop to look at something we're interested in (for example, shoes) and then when we see something we like, then we may engage with the shop assistant to find out about whether they have it in different colours, the right size for our feet, what the price is etc. We certainly don't appreciate over enthusiastic shop assistants telling us what to buy or trying to be a part of our selection process - not unless we actually like them. When I last bought a suit in a shop, I bonded with the shop assistant as he was good looking (so sue me I am shallow) and we're both cyclists and he talked me into buying a second pair of trousers with the suit because I might wear out one pair if I intend to cycle to work in my suit. I listened to him as he won my trust. However, I contrast that to an experience in Singapore where the shop assistant followed me around the shop and when I took a blue T-shirt off the rack to take a closer look, she literally said out aloud, "that one is blue colour!" I rolled my eyes in disbelief at how poor her sales skills were, it was so horrendously bad it was funny.
DeleteI would have ranked Ali pretty high for his sales skills having seen him in action, that's why I thought he was wasted in a role like that. And you're absolutely right, he was shooting the messenger. Mind you, he probably would have been entitled to take a cut of my commissions if I had stayed on and worked under him, that was his incentive to impress me and keep me on - but clearly, he failed to do that and I chose to walk away.
Lol that tailor shop assistant really finessed you with that smooth segue into a spare pair of trousers to fight against wear and tear. Considering suits aren't cheap that sounds like a better job than selling cosmetics.
DeleteYeah, Ali does sound committed and actually charming, he was just selling the wrong products to the wrong people. Though I dunno what other job he could've applied for that was higher up the food chain since I don't work in sales.
Well yes he did the oldest trick in the book and I fell for it. He told me how good and amazing I looked - if I didn't exercise any self control, he would have talked me into buying everything in the store because "oh sir you would look so good in that." Not a million miles away from what Ali was doing by telling how good those ladies would look if they bought his makeover bundle, but you get the idea. My friend who had worked in a job like that before told me that sales staff get a small commission when they help a customer like that, so it's a win-win-win situation: the customers end up spending a lot more money in the store when the sales assistant gives the customer great recommendations, the sales assistant makes more money when they earn commission and the customer has a really pleasant shopping experience there.
DeleteAs for moving up the food chain and selling, Ali was earning only £15 (like US$20.35) per package he sold and so that's not a lot of money. This is because the product wasn't that expensive (it was a bundle of a lot of different products rather than one expensive item on it's own like a diamond ring), so his profit margin was very slim. You wanna make money in sales - you sell something with a big fat profit margin. So if you sold a sports car for example, the price tag is hugely inflated. So if you have a limited edition sports car, the price you pay doesn't reflect the cost of the engine, the components, the workmanship etc. Rather, you're in a bidding war with other buyers who want to buy that car. So if there are only ten such limited edition cars available and ten other buyers are willing to pay $500,000 for that car, then you have to spend more than $500,000 if you wanna buy that car and then the bidding war continues. It's like that when you wanna buy a house on the market: the asking price is $500,000 then a buyer says, "okay I'll take it at that price." But if you're interested, you can then say to the seller, "I'll offer you $510,000 - sell it to me instead." Then seller naturally goes back to the first guy and says, "I now have an offer for $510,000 - do you wanna raise your original offer? Otherwise, I'll go with that offer."
When bidding wars like that occur, the person who is laughing all the way to the bank is the middleman - ie. the salesman because when the deal is done at a hugely inflated price, the salesman gets a massive commission payment for simply being in the right place at the right time. That's so much more lucrative than Ali making £15 per sale. Such salesmen can easily make over a million per transaction when they happen to be the middlemen in such deals. So why doesn't Ali wanna do a sales job like that then and use his sales skills to literally earn millions?
Lol this shop assistant must've really buttered you up by saying "hey Alex wouldn't you look sexy in this dark blue suit over here? I can give you a 10% discount..." I'm glad I do all my clothes shopping online so I can't be manipulated that way haha. But even then straight male shop assistants don't work in women's clothing stores so there wouldn't be anybody to charm me anyway.
DeleteAhh I see, so Ali should have signed up to be a salesperson at a car dealership rather than working at a mall selling cosmetics. Or if he wanted to sell cosmetics he could have worked at a Sephora or other makeup store instead. They have much more foot traffic and many women go to those stores regularly, including myself. Hell even selling electronics to people would've been a better product to sell. A smartphone is minimum $200 and a laptop minimum $600. Not to mention accessories like printers and monitors or software like Microsoft office or videogames.
Aaaah that shop assistant knew how to butter me up but he didn't offer a discount! Remember, if he was earning a commission (I can't confirm that but a friend who worked in a similar kind of shop told me that was the case) and he wasn't going to give away his commission to me by offering that to me as a discount. If his commission was 10%, then what would have been the point of offering me a 10% discount? And if he could achieve the same thing by telling me how sexy and awesome I look, then why offer me a discount if that's what he was trying to earn?
DeleteAs for a better job for Ali, a car dealership is a great place for 2 reasons: firstly, the cars are not cheap. Even average cars are expensive and luxury cars can cost an insane amount of money - besides, there's the upsell. That means once the customer has bought the car, you can offer them a whole range of accessories from a great sound system to an insurance policy to child/baby seats. The more you add into the package, the more you can earn. That's easily done with the car but with Ali's makeover bundle, he has a product that he cannot upsell - his employers have already determined what was in the package and he cannot mess around with it. All he could do to tempt you to buy was to offer a small discount but that came out of his commission.
Mind you, I'm not smart like you when it comes to the sciences but when it comes to commerce, I do know all about how to make money from sales. That's why I liked revisiting this story about Ali in 2022 - I met him in 2000 when I was young and wasn't that wise, I had so little work experience then but today, I'm a bald, old, experienced businessman and so I have a fresh perspective looking back at this story - that's why I wanted to share the story and revisit that memory.
DeleteWell this shop assistant could have inflated the price before giving you a discount haha. Some shops don't even put prices on their items out in the open, you have to ask them before they'll give you a price. But yeah with certain clientele who can clearly afford it, you don't have to offer any discount, instead just make them want the product more.
DeleteOh yeah even used cars are minimum $4k usd, a 10% commission would be minimum $400 bucks. You're right Alex! After you buy a car, all those extra accessories, especially the car insurance, are basically gonna get bought anyway. As a kid whenever we went to the mall and someone like Ali tried to talk to me, I used to dread ever having to work in the same job as an adult because I knew I would have zero social skills to convince people to buy a product that isn't even that good. So of course I poured all my efforts into being a good product maker instead, but when I come to your blog and read about all these psychology tricks, it's not as complicated or impossible as I thought haha. But of course people being told to sell things at the mall are fighting a losing battle because the odds are heavily stacked against them. In the sciences it's the equivalent of someone being sent to solve an impossible problem using a very low budget (e.g build a new iPhone using $1 of parts). That's why we usually send unproven lowly paid PhD students to work on these types of problems haha, we're expendable. However, at least if someone is ridiculously talented they can innovate a new way to solve an impossible problem to make a name for themselves, but with Ali there is hardly any new sales tactic he could develop to sell more products at the mall.
Well we were in a shop where the prices of everything was clearly labelled - that's often the case in the UK. Even if it is not that obvious, like even if there isn't a big sign showing you what the price is, you can search around on the item and find the price tag somewhere on it. But that's not the point: a very key principle about sales is the golden rule, "be proud of your prices, never ever offer a discount." If I were to sell you something, I'd be far better off trying to win your trust as a business who have very reasonable prices offering good value for money than some kind of devious crook who would jack up the price and charge whatever I can get away with. That's why when you go into a bazaar in somewhere like Morocco, you would have to haggle like crazy to get a good price and there are Youtube videos of people in places like China where they haggle and manage to get something stupid like 10% to 15% of the original asking price. Now I don't like shopping experiences like that because you know you have to haggle, you know they have inflated the prices and that's not what classy establishments in the UK (and indeed the US) would do. I prefer shopping at places where you know there's ZERO chance of a discount, like it cost what it says on the price tag and the staff are not allowed to even offer a discount. However, the staff can explain why this product is so great and justify why you're paying this price for it. Top end boutiques in the UK tend to follow that principle - especially if the staff are earning commissions. If they say, "I'm not allowed to give you a discount", it also means "I'm not sharing my commission with you." I'd like to think that a highly qualified and smooth sales person can use the power of persuasion to convince the customer why they ought to buy that product at that price, without having to resort to giving any discounts. Discounts often send out the wrong signal but hey, you've probably been manipulated as a customer so many times as a buyer looking for sales and discounts - I'm on the other side of the equation as a seller, as a salesman so whenever I see the word 'discount', for me that's a massive red flag. All these sales tactics are not highly guarded trade secrets, it is actually really easy to manipulate people once you've done sales for a few years and learn the tricks of the trade. It's just that I'd rather make massive commissions each time I do the sale rather than just £15 each time, which was the case with Ali.
DeleteIncidentally, I've just watched the latest episode of The Apprentice in the UK and the candidates on the losing team were awful at selling. The first thing they did was crumble and offer discounts instead of trying to convince the customers why they were offering such good value for money - so they sold all their available products whilst barely making any profit and that led to their loss in the boardroom. When you're trying to make a living from sales, the objective is not to sell as much as possible but to make as much profit as possible. There was this line from the episode which summarizes the situation, "You didn't understand the basic purpose of the task was to make a profit from the transaction, rather than simply selling as much as possible. I can go out there and sell a £10 note for just £5 - I can probably sell out very quickly but that doesn't make me a good salesperson. Just because you sold everything doesn't make you a good salesperson and that's why your team lost the task and one of you will be fired as a result."
DeleteOh I totally get what you mean by not wanting to haggle. Coming from Southeast Asia you always have to haggle because the prices are jacked up not 10-15% higher, but 200% higher. Whenever my family would vacation in Bali my parents had to haggle like crazy and pretend to walk away whenever we went shopping. I guess I would prefer respectable stores where they told me more about the product than just the price.
DeleteLol yeah that is a horrible way to try to win at the Apprentice. Even a place like Walmart, Tesco's or Aldi which prides itself on low prices still does the math to maintain scale in order to profit. This kinda reminds me of the insanity that is going on in Silicon Valley where rich investors prop up money losing startups just because those startups are fast growing. I hate when startups use the excuse "Amazon didn't make a profit for 10 years" to excuse burning money in order to bring in customers without a profitable business model. In sales at least one can't simply hide behind the word "tech" to get away from profitability.
The process of bargaining is not good for business - it breaks trust. I remember being in a market in Shanghai years ago when I wanted to buy something and it was the kind of place where you needed to haggle, the rule was to offer about 20% of the asking price and then settle around the 33% mark. I just got to the point where I was like, you know what, I'm not even that fussed, I don't wanna play your games, bye I'm leaving. She then chased me down the market and yelled at me, if you didn't want to buy it, why did you waste my time then? I was like if you wanted to make a sale you would have dropped your price and not waste my time - go find another dumb tourist to sell your crap to, I'm outta here. No no no, haggling and discounts are not conducive for long term business relationships. It's not just high end boutiques, you know I have several properties and I'm a landlord. I use the same plumber whenever I have any issues that need his skills - I never haggle with the price he gives as he gives me a very down to earth price. So I keep going back to him because the trust has been established with him offering me a single discount ever, that's how you win your customer's trust in the long run - just offer a decent price and no discounts will ever be necessary.
DeleteAs for start ups burning through money, after my years of experience in corporate finance, I know exactly what kind of companies to invest in and which ones to avoid. Believe you me, a lot of people in my kind of position can sniff the bullshit from a thousand miles away.
But yes I remember a time when I was in Bintan of all places, I wanted to eat sate and I speak enough Bahasa Indonesia to ask how much the prices were and some of these places with no prices displayed were asking for ridiculous prices like the equivalent of US$2 for a single stick of satay. It's obvious that I am this Chinese looking guy speaking heavily accented Malay - it was their cue to jack up the price immediately. In the end, we actually found an old man with his prices displayed and that's where we had dinner. That's a simple example of how that old man won my trust with that simple gesture by displaying his prices and thus I knew exactly what I was paying.
DeleteHmm I suppose disagreeing over price is not good social skills. At the high end people don't like starting a fight during business negotiations, it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth like when that seller chased you down the market. It just baffles me that places in Asia still like to haggle haha.
DeleteOh no never go to a restaurant where people haggle over prices. $2 for a single stick is crazy unless it's a very high end sate restaurant. But with Indonesian food usually the most humble places have the best food, like an old man or woman who has a small stall.
Glad to know you haven't bought into the tech startup hype. Seriously some of these companies are just an app with a totally free product that are just hoping and praying that they can get enough ad revenue away from Google or Facebook to become profitable one day, without actually having a product people want to pay for. Last I heard even Reddit wasn't profitable till recently, and it's one of the websites with the highest internet traffic in the world.
Perhaps it is a cultural thing but haggling is okay and normal in some cultures but not others. I hate it but I'll do it if I have to - I have written about this experience in Morocco before. You can't drink tap water there, you must buy bottled water so I asked the guy at the hotel (whom I trusted) what I should pay and he said, "for a standard one 1 liter bottle, no more than 4 dirhams and you must haggle." When I walked into the shop (remember, me and my Chinese face), the shopkeeper said, "hello sir, what can I get you?" in perfect English. When he got me a bottle of water he tried to charge me 7 dirhams for it. I then argued with him in French and got the price down to 5 dirhams - finally when I switched to Arabic then I got the local price of 4 dirhams. So on one hand, there's an element of yes I got the local price but on the other hand, bloody hell, think of all the other tourists that pay 5 or 7 dirhams for that same bottle of water. I like going into a grocery store, seeing the price of an item and just paying that price. That never happens in places like North Africa or Asia. I suppose it's the chance for the shopkeeper or taxi driver to feel as if they are negotiating like businessmen but they don't realize it doesn't help build confidence in their brand. I suppose for a lot of these people they're never gonna see me again, like if I am buying a bottle of water at a tourist attraction - I've been there, done that, never gonna return. So they may as well rip me off, they're not counting on me to return the next day to buy more stuff there like a regular customer and the regular customers, the locals, might get treated differently.
DeleteLol knowing that many languages means you can haggle in whatever language is necessary haha. Yeah I don't get why its worth it to haggle so much, unless the shopkeepers are so used to customers haggling down they are forced to pre-emptively inflate prices. Though in Bali most of the Western tourists don't know how to haggle so they effectively pay higher prices, but they don't care because their home currency is much stronger than the Indonesian Rupiah. And like you said they won't ever see the shopkeeper again so it's not too big of a hassle to get ripped off once. If I was ripped off by my local grocery store I will never go back there again and find a cheaper place. Even now I always go to 3 different nearby grocery stores to find the cheapest eggs, granola, or meat. Can you imagine if the stock market had haggling? It would take forever to execute a single trade... But that's probably how stock markets worked back back then in the 1700s.
DeleteActually you're wrong about stock exchanges. That's not how they work per se. Stocks are bought and sold, traded at a certain price as quoted on the stock exchange. The fact that there is a clear price negates the need to bargain. That's a very Western style of doing business where we value clarity, transparency and trust. Of course, you could argue that you could have one party selling some stocks to another at a discount, but that would then be a discount negotiated by two parties outside the mechanism of the stock exchange and that's why the business community likes that kind of clarity and efficiency with stock markets when prices are extremely clear - that's good for business because you can't haggle. The price of the stock is whatever it is valued at on the stock market.
DeleteThe first stock exchange was established in Antwerp back in 1531 and even in the early days, people could see the benefit of eliminating the kind of business culture where you had to haggle over the price in favour of one where there is trust, transparency and clarity over pricing. Like I said, it's a cultural thing. White people like those values whilst third world countries like to haggle. I've only haggled in poorer places like in China, Dominican Republic, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Indonesia. I would never ever be able to haggle in a place like Finland, Norway, Germany or Switzerland. There's definitely a cultural dimension to this divide.
DeleteHmm that's a very interesting topic you point out. In the west when people do business they want as much honesty with regards to pricing. Of course there are some cases where people do haggle, like selling one football player between two football clubs, but for more commodities like groceries, souvenirs, or stocks, there is in general no haggling. I kinda wonder why this cultural divide exists, it seems haggling has not died out in Asia except in places which cater to more international clientele, or have clientele who value their time more than saving a few bucks. It certainly isn't efficient time-wise to spend too much time haggling on each transaction.
DeleteIt isn't just Asia where haggling is part of the culture but I have experienced it in Latin America as well as in Africa and Turkey. I associate it with poorer, third world countries, rather than rich countries. When I was in Puerto Rico as it is so Americanized, there was no haggling. The moment I took the short flight over to Dominican Republic, I had to haggle for everything. Then there are places like Argentina where you're not quite third world but not quite America yet - so it's like in Turkey of course you MUST haggle or else you're not getting a good price. But in Argentina, you might not get any discount at all or you might get a tiny discount if you push really hard but it's not like you can haggle them down to 20% of the asking price (like you can in China). I remember when I was getting a guide to drive me around some of the most remote areas of Patagonia in the Andes mountain in Argentina - I asked for a discount and he said I don't do discounts as my prices are already very reasonable but as a gesture of goodwill, I'll take you out for dinner the day you arrive, how about that?
DeleteI have often joked that if I weren't doing the job that I have right now, I wouldn't know what to do because I couldn't even work as a greeter at a Walmart. To have to be nice to people and pretend that I am happy they are there would be tortuous for me. I think Ali was resourceful in pretending to be gay. I hope Ali is in a better job that can fully utilize his skills and compensate him better. Perhaps Ali was just bidding his time and waiting for something better.
ReplyDeleteWell I only spent 2 hours with him back then so it's not like we ever became friends and kept in touch. I wish him the best and our paths never crossed again after that day.
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