Haggling spoken here: gender, class, and style in US garage sale bargaining.

 
  I'll bargain anytime. You don't expect people to come down much in the 
  first hour, but it doesn't hurt to ask. [At] another little sale ... 
  [they] had a beautiful screen, bamboo screen. He wanted $8 for it ... 
  I walked around and asked him the price on it. I seen the price. He 
  said, "$8." So, I didn't say nothing. I walked around. I started back 
  to the car and stopped and said, "I'll give you $5 for it." She said, 
  "Okay." Just like that. One thing you never do is act anxious for 
  anything. You never run to anything and say, "Ooh!--Get this! It's 
  just what I want." You pick it up, put it down, think it over. Draw 
  attention to something else. You know, "What do you want for this?" 
  "Well, what do you want for that?" Already they think they're going to 
  lose and their hearts go down. Then they figure it out: "Give me $2.50 
  for it and you can have it." That's the fun of it--trying to see the 
  deals you can get. That's the fun of bargaining. And you'll find some 
  people stand up and argue straight on down. And they don't care 
  whether they pay $5 or $10 for it. They can afford it. It's just fun. 
  --Tammy Smith, 61, divorced, food service worker 

BARGAINING IS AN INTERACTIVE PRACTICE IN WHICH A SHOPPER AND seller produce a mutually created price for merchandise, each bringing judgments and values to bear in determining what an item is worth to them. In contrast to the formal economic system of fixed prices and passive consumption, shoppers in the US garage sale can alter prices in a more personalized form of trade. Given the cultural norm of posted prices, bargaining is often considered embarrassing or unsavory, and opinions about bargaining vary greatly. Some participants love to bargain, as does Tammy Smith (1) quoted above, viewing it as a cardinal aspect of garage sale shopping, while others find the practice distasteful and avoid it whenever possible. But few garage sale participants can entirely escape this form of small-scale haggling. This article examines bargaining styles in the US garage sale from an anthropological perspective, with a special focus on the gendered and class aspects of this form of price negotiation. (2)

The practice of small-scale bargaining in the US garage sale is significant for a number of reasons. In contrast to the norms of fixed prices and passive consumption, it provides a degree of empowerment, both pecuniary and psychological, in that individual actors can influence the price of goods through their knowledge of consumer goods and skill in negotiation. Bargaining transactions in the garage sale are more socially engaged than commodity exchange in the mainstream economy, providing a counterexample to the dominant model of the West as a thoroughly rationalized economy and to the overarching market paradigm prevalent in Western societies (e.g., Dilley). We too often ignore examples of social embeddedness in our own economic transactions (Granovetter). This treatment of garage sale bargaining contributes to the growing body of cultural economics (e.g., Wilk) and provides a unique ethnographic account of this shopping practice as called for by Miller. (3) It also adds to the growing body of literature on the sociocultural creation of price in Western societies (e.g., Alexander; Geismar; Prus). Further, such small-scale bargaining is of enduring general interest to the public; there have been a number of newspaper accounts of the bargaining research (e.g., Ringle; Sanders).

The garage sale, in addition to the flea market (Maisel; Sherry) and rummage sale, is one of the few arenas in American society where people from all walks of life can engage in bargaining over the cost of low- and moderately-priced consumer goods. Many business people, such as contractors and purchasing agents, engage in price negotiation, and it is culturally accepted for average people to bargain for some larger consumer items, such as houses, stereos, and automobiles. However, these goods represent a major investment for the buyer, have prices established to leave a large margin for bargaining, and frequently involve peripheral profits in financing, insurance, optional equipment, service packages, and so forth. Further, the purveyors of such bargained-for goods--real estate agents, used car dealers, Oriental carpet sellers--tend to be viewed as dishonest and untrustworthy in US society. Edward Hall observes, "Americans tend to look down on people who haggle" (101). Many Americans consider bargaining a "foreign" or culturally marginal practice (e.g., Brookhiser; O'Rourke). (4) Joy Browne writes, "Haggling has always had an unpleasant connotation to most Americans" (1). Although bargaining evokes images of "foreignness," the price negotiation practiced in the garage sale is one that people from many other cultures would find brief and underdeveloped.

In the wake of globalized trade and Internet markets, there is a new interest in alternative modes of exchange, such as auctions (especially Internet sites such as eBay), bartering (often using local currencies, such as Ithaca HOURS), and bargaining. Newspaper articles report that more Americans are bargaining for a range of goods, even in stores (Worley). Hotel, travel, and telephone rates and numerous posted prices in retail outlets are increasingly seen as the starting point for negotiation (Schwartz), although there has always been the possibility of cutting a deal for a wide array of goods and services, particularly with small merchants (Schouten). Ironically, just as the media is touting the desirability of bargaining, some automobile dealers are attracting customers with a low price, haggle-free come-on (e.g., CarMax, Saturn). The move to fixed price auto sales reveals that, although established in American society primarily for the purchase of higher-ticket items, the practice of bargaining is beset by ambivalence and inconsistent usage.

So prevalent is the practice of haggling in the garage sale that many proprietors set higher prices with the expectation that shoppers will bargain. One sale organizer entitled his article on neighborhood sales "Collective Bargaining," and advised: "There are two schools of thought on pricing: Set prices high and be prepared to bargain or set them low and be prepared to bargain" (Dylla 9). He ironically emphasized the extent to which bargaining is an accepted, even expected practice in the garage sale setting for many--but not for all. There is considerable variation in bargaining practice, and I have treated the cultural parameters of garage sale negotiation, highlighting the intra- and intercultural variation of the practice, in another article (Herrmann, "Negotiating Culture").

The Bargaining Process