How much bargaining is too much?

Once again, pardon my absence. This time, I feel like it’s justified, since I was nursing a fight with malaria for the last week. Couldn’t have been at a worse time, really, since I was supposed to host a HIV awareness workshop for any member of staff associated with the Aga Khan Development Network – a pretty big group.

The workshop went on, but not without some emergency power-puking near the halftime mark: by the end of it, I was curled into the foetal position on a mat outside the door. Luckily, four injections later I am back to the white ball of energy my co-workers and basketball teammates expect.

The tourists are back in full swing at this point despite the sporadic torrential storms of the short rain season. There’s a stark contrast between the two main groups of tourists that visit Zanzibar: the wealthy elite, who pay outrageous money (up to US$1,000 per night) for all-inclusive resort packages on the beaches of the East Coast; and the deal-hunting backpackers, who scamper through Stone Town bargaining down every price regardless of the original quote.

As a Stone Town resident, I’m regularly frustrated by the abundance of the latter. Don’t get me wrong, I love backpacking and I love bargaining. But ultimately, there’s a difference between getting ripped off, and ripping off the salesman who’s too desperate to say no to your final price.

This simple graph illustrates the price of “stuff” in the market in nearly any African or Asian country. By market, I mean any store without walls: the food market, souvenirs, street meat, clothes, whatever.Obviously, the longer you stay and bitch about the price, the lower the price gets. This makes perfect sense, because a few passers-by don’t know about bargaining and simply accept the first price offered to them (to the profit and delight of the salesman). Unfortunately, this rarely happens.

Salesmen are almost always middlemen. Farmers are too busy tending their crops to sell them, just as wood carvers and sewers are too busy working. As a result, nearly every salesman pays the local market rate for whatever they are selling, then hopes to sell it at a small premium to make enough money to feed his family.

With that in mind, let’s put this price curve in the context of the item’s cost to the salesman, which obviously doesn’t get any cheaper for him. Every extra dollar he sells it for is an extra dollar in his pocket - worth noting since a backpacker bargaining from $4 to $3.50 is saving about 14%, but if the item cost $3 he is cutting the salesman’s profits in half.Now I’m all about bargaining and not getting ripped off. But in my opinion there comes a point when backpackers take it too far. They have a tendency of hammering down prices to absurd levels, well below a “fair” price just to test their bargaining abilities. I mean, at some point, when you’re paying $1 for a hand-carved necklace, is the extra 10 cents really anything but ego-stroking?

My personal favourite is when backpackers tell the locals they are “poor” travellers to gain sympathy, when the locals fully understand that the price of a return plane ticket to Zanzibar costs more than they would likely make in 10 years. Buddy, don’t bother.

Although we all have different backgrounds, North Americans and Europeans come from privilege. We can’t empathize with people who have endured true poverty – scraping to make enough money to feed yourself or your family.

Don’t get me wrong, I will walk away from some guy doubling the price because of the colour of my skin… But I try to have the decency to know when enough is enough: a massive portion of thick-cut fries and salad for 80 cents might be a rip off to a local, but you won’t catch me complaining.