A Bazaar Encounter

I recently got back from a trip to India where, in addition to building a ton of great memories, I got to participate in one of the most striking and unique cultural experiences that great country has to offer – the Bazaar.

As a retail entrepreneur, I love to study different approaches to sales and customer service. The Indian Bazaar is particularly interesting because it’s about as different from modern western retailing as it gets. It’s louder, more aggressive, and far more confrontational than the passive “have you been helped?” approach that has become the norm here.

The vendors are extremely sharp, with keen instincts, and a home-court advantage that they use rather effectively. They’ve learned through experience how to turn seemingly benign questions like “What is your name?” and “Where are you from?” into profitable sales. And, Ashok, a shop owner at a market outside of Jaipur, was truly one of the best I’d encountered. He was not only a gifted linguist – he spoke 5 languages fluently – but also a masterful rapport builder, a skilled negotiator, and a veritable human calculator. I was excited for the challenge of haggling with him, but still could scarcely overcome the feeling that I was wearing pajamas to a black-tie event.

I was eyeing a t-shirt rather excitedly, which practically invited the pitch. After some pleasantries, Ashok’s opening offer of 1,200 rupees ($18) was miles from my paltry 200 rupee ($3) bid and frankly surprised me. I thought I was being fair, but his (obviously) feigned shock still somehow made me feel stingy. We went back and forth – he offered two for X and three for Y to sweeten the deal. But after several rounds of this, I could no longer keep up well enough to know if the offers even made sense. There may have even been a time or two where I countered against myself! When the dust finally settled after 10 minutes or so, I handed Ashok a 500 rupee ($7.50) note. Despite the fact that I was “robbing him,” he agreed to honor the deal since the shirt “looked good on me." A sucker for a compliment, I knew then that had he said that sooner, there's a good chance he'd have made even more money in less time. 

When I returned to my hotel that evening, I happened to pass the gift shop and there, hanging in the window in plain sight, was the exact shirt I’d just “stolen” from Ashok…on sale for 200 rupees! I felt like I did when I’d just learned that (spoiler alert) Bruce Willis’ character had been dead the entire movie.

Ashok was a very skilled salesperson who had all the right tools. He could connect, engage, and get deals done. But he was playing a one-shot game. Tourists pop in and out, and there’s no “Yelp” for flea market hawkers. So, almost by default, you get what you can, while you can. But what if that weren’t the case and this was more like, say, buying a car? That would certainly be different wouldn’t it? Well perhaps not, and based on survey data and customer feedback it sounds like car buying is just a glitzier higher stakes version of the same game.

My simple analysis clearly ignores the social, historical, cultural, and economic forces that are at play here. An Indian Bazaar obviously isn’t a US car dealership, and a US car dealership obviously isn’t an Indian Bazaar, but if that’s so, then why do they feel so similar? The approach clearly seems to work in one case, but it just as clearly doesn’t in the other, so then why do we insist on it?

When my partners and I founded CarLotz in 2011 we asked ourselves that very question, and the simple answer was, as it often is in these cases, “because it’s always been that way.” I’m so glad we got off that highway when we did and pursued a different path because I really can’t imagine a bright future for that approach in the long-term.

It’s really kind of sad when you think about it – here one of the most expensive purchases most people will ever make, and it’s like haggling over tchotchkes at a flea market. I guess it’s true that when you travel, you learn as much about home as the place you’re visiting.