The New York Times had an article about bargaining for Electronics with megastores like Best Buy, Circuit City:
It appears that you can bargain at these types of places.
So why is bargaining out of fashion at a North American grocery store, but acceptable on a car lot or perhaps an electronic store?
If I hazard a guess it would be that bargaining makes more sense on big ticket items. Imagine how long it would take if I bargained on everything in my grocery cart. This is because there are fixed cost to bargaining. Second a company needs to empower employees to make deals. This works well for cars, since negotiations can be made at the reduction of the salesperson’s commission.
3 comments:
As a former grocery store employee, I can also tell you that grocery stores also don't have a huge profit margin on food items, so there's not a lot of wiggle room there. Grocery stores only put stuff on sale when their distributor puts stuff on sale-- the mark-up stays the same. (Unless, of course, something's about to go off.)
I'm probably not a good model, living in Africa way too long, but I've bargained on things in the US successfully that were somewhere between groceries and cars, including but not limited to kayaks and sneakers. I think there are two keys to success:
1. There is a legitimate reason for a price deduction (demo model, minor damage, etc)
2. The store is independantly owned, leaving store employees with more control than in major chains
My parents bought a floor model for a discount TV which lasted from the early 80s to the mid 90s.
I tried to find this good article where a guy bargained for everything he purchased in a day with some positive results. Maybe I should try to bargain more.
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