Written by Lucy Zhang
Description: An article about how some people lie to bargain in shops
Instructions: Read the short article below and answer the questions or fill in the spaces.
Many people like to bargain in street markets and shops and are quite good at it. In some countries, tourists have come to learn that they need to bargain when buying things in street markets and even shops in recent years. Perhaps some of them now quite enjoy this kind of way of buying things or are just interested in it as a new thing. The author is quite sure that most tourists (e.g. in markets in Asia) lack some of the clues to bargaining. There are three main reasons for this, and these are explained below.
Most foreigners don’t have a good command of the local language so they don’t know how to play with words while offering a price while bargaining. Secondly they are not sure of some of the views on buying and selling inside that country, so they lack any way to analyze sellers by their tone of voice, the accents of those from a different area, body gestures (such as eye contact) and the nonverbal meanings of words. These key points can help us in shaping the character of the sellers and to change the strategy of those bargaining. Experts are good at psychological tactics. Thirdly the retailers often think that tourists are rich, and refuse to offer or accept a low price. But it is impossible for tourists to tell from their faces what the stallholders are thinking about.
The author prefers buying things in supermarkets or malls; not merely because the author isn’t an expert when it comes to bargaining, but the author doesn’t want to waste time ‘fighting’ for a reasonable price. Moreover one point is that some products which cost you a fortune because of their high quality need to be bought at a mall that has a high reputation, as at one of these supermarkets there is consistent quality, not like in the street markets.
