40 Terrible Potential Buyers That Perfectly Illustrate Why Selling Online Can Be Such A Pain (New Pics)

While the examples here are quite ridiculous, we can try to give some hagglers the benefit of the doubt. After all, in a lot of cultures, one haggles over everything, from a simple cup to a hotel room. In parts of Southeast Asia, it is not recommended to haggle over meals, however. Ingredients at a market are fair game, but a full meal is often seen as a necessity and should not be treated as a commodity. 

The word haggle is often associated with the image of one-on-one bargaining with a salesperson in an open-air market, but in reality, every large business is haggling constantly. They just use the word “negotiations” to make it seem more arcane. A rule of thumb is that if a salesperson is involved, there is wiggle room for the price. But the salesperson also has an interest in getting the price up, so you may not come out ahead.

Often, bargaining is less tied to culture, but to the distance between owner and buyer. A simple store clerk is not going to haggle much with a customer, as they would not be paid a commission on the sale and the owner is unlikely to give them such power in the first place. That being said, in some areas, stores are blending the two, by authorizing certain clerks to act as salespeople, within specific price limits.

Haggling might benefit its most skilled practitioners individually, but studies show that if it becomes the norm, prices tend to rise. After all, large businesses can employ economies of scale to reduce costs and compete by using a lower price than a competitor. A smaller shopkeeper is unlikely to purchase enough merchandise to get significant savings based on sales volume.

Economies of scale drive bulk purchasing, where the seller is willing to go down on the per-unit cost in exchange for a larger order. Since the seller's margin is rarely just higher than the cost, they can use this flexibility to still make a profit. Wholesale retailers like Costco use this to offer great prices to their customers. Other major retailers have tried to copy its success with their own variants, for example, Walmart’s Sam's Club. While we as consumers can’t really haggle with a Walmart clerk, we still benefit from their competition forcing the price down. 

We also reached out to the moderators behind the Choosing Beggars subreddit to ask a few questions. We wanted to know where they would draw the line between real haggling and just being a nuisance. "It's circumstantial, there's no perfect answer. Generally, an inappropriate spread between the request's value versus the beggar's offer would be the sort of 30,000-foot response." Regarding why a person might act like this, they mentioned that:"It could range from a person simply being inexperienced in seeing what qualifies as a fair exchange, other times it could be some type of vent for an unrelated stressful event in their lives."