My eyes widened in horror. He wanted how much for a packet of cheese slices? Did this big Mozambican man in a little hat, manning a threadbare cupboard of a market stall in a region as cheap as southeast Africa, really think I’d believe that was the price? This… this was personal.
I’d just arrived in Mozambique after a couple of months embroiled in the cutthroat bartering madhouses of Morocco, so considered myself a pretty handy haggler at this point. The trouble is, there’s a time and a place, and this definitely wasn’t it.
What’s it worth locally?
The first mistake was assuming what cheese was actually worth in this remote northern corner of Mozambique.
Given I’d just bought an entire fresh lobster for about 5 US dollars, it seemed ludicrous that some nasty cheddar slices would set me back twice that, but it really wasn’t. In coastal Mozambique, lobster is cheap because the neighbourhood fishermen have easy access to the rich harvests of the Indian Ocean.
Processed cheese on the other hand was a luxury item that had to be transported vast distances from industrialised neighbours like South Africa. So before I’d even opened my mouth, the fair price floating about in my head was completely wrong – there was no hope this was going to end well.
When in Rome…
The second issue was that while this particular mercado had a bit of a ramshackle look, it also had set prices.
The stallholder was confused that I was even trying to get a discount – the cost of the cheese was simply not up for debate. Imagine barging into a supermarket and demanding the teenager working the checkout give you a two for one deal. That’s basically what I was doing.
Not all haggling cultures are the same. In the bazaars of North Africa and the Middle East, it can seem like everything is up for negotiation. But you wouldn’t expect to do much haggling in Japan. Even within countries, haggling might be applicable in certain situations, but not others.
A good, obvious clue is if the price is actually written on the item or a board, although sometimes, like when your vision is clouded with rage over how goddamn expensive a certain dairy product is, a price list can be easy to miss.
Don’t take it personally
This was my biggest mistake. Maybe it was the lack of sleep after a long plane journey, maybe it was the fact I had arrived in Mozambique for a volunteering program and expected to be greeted like some kind of hero, not as a rich target to rip off in a cheese entrapment scheme.
Even if this guy was up for a bit of bartering – which as we have established, he wasn’t – getting angry would have doomed the whole process from the start.
To make it fun and improve your chances of a good deal, laugh, make eye contact, befriend the salesperson. They’ll be trying the same on you – if people like someone, they’re more likely to shift towards your price. It’s also far easier to throw in lowball counteroffers in a jokey sort of way rather than as a threat. Nobody likes to feel threatened over cheese.
A fair price for both of you
The reason I was angry was it felt unfair, as if I was being targeted because I was a foreigner. I took it personally, and even started ranting at him about racial discrimination (not exactly an appropriate topic for a white guy to bring up in a country that was a major departure point for the slave trade).
While on this occasion I wasn’t actually getting an elevated price, on that first day I knew that I’d had to pay more for other things because I was foreign.
It is a ridiculous thing to get pissed off about – in my home country of Australia, taxi drivers won’t hesitate to take someone who is obviously a tourist the long route. More importantly, back in Australia I’d earn in a couple of hours what my Mozambican shopkeeper would make in profit over a week.
Prices are relative – not just for places, but for people. In haggling, don’t focus exclusively on getting the absolute best price possible, pay what you think the item is worth. Paying a few extra dollars could mean a hell of a lot to the person you’re buying that product off, but don’t go overboard.
Invariably, if you negotiate in the right spirit, with the right price in mind, the shopkeeper will respect you more than if you hadn’t tried to haggle at all. Days after the cheese incident, after I’d had time to absorb how many levels of wrong I’d been and returned to apologise to the shopkeeper, he begrudgingly complimented my tenacity, if nothing else.
If only I hadn’t been doing it the wrong way, in the wrong spirit, at the wrong place, for the wrong kind of item. Why buy cheese slices anyway, when you can have lobster?