In many countries across the world, negotiating over price (also known as haggling) is an extremely common practice. Everything is negotiable and there are certain techniques that people commonly use overseas to get a deal, but more often than not, it’s not like that when dealing with retail stores in the United States. You might be able to haggle over furniture, the purchase of a new car, or the purchase of a home, but for every day purchases, the prices seem to be pretty much set, especially at some of the national-chain retail stores. That is, until recently.
With fears over continued declining retail sales, some retailers have started allowing their employees to accept discounted prices on some types of product, especially some products which have extremely large mark-ups. Electronics are one of the types of products that are commonly negotiated on.
The major retail stores that have been known to allow customers to haggle over the prices of certain products are Best Buy, Home Depot, and Circuit City before they went bankrupt. Are these the only retail stores you can try to haggle at? Absolutely not! You’ll have a lot more luck in haggling with smaller, independent retailers, such as appliance and electronics stores that actually have the power to give you a lower price and accept less profit. You might even be able to individually talk to the owner and haggle with the person that has all of the power in the world to negotiate with you.
If you are at a big box retailer, you might not be able to always negotiate, but there are a lot of stores that will match any price offered by a competitor. You could find a good price online, present it to the store, and then get the great price for the product and then not have to pay for shipping. You can also find manufacturers coupons for a lot of different types of products online, so if you’re going to make a major purchase, you should spend a few minutes searching on the web for coupons for the product that you’re going to buy.
There’s also a trick that you can use in clothing stores that I’ve personally seen work at JC Penny and a few other stores. When I was in line at JC Penny, the woman in-front of my pointed out a small defect in a piece of clothing that she wanted to purchase, and without hesitation, the cashier offered the woman 20% off on the product!
The moral of the story is that you should never just accept the ’sticker price’ for anything that’s more than $100.00 to pay for. There’s almost always something that you can do to get a better price for a product, whether it involves haggling, comparing prices online, using manufacturers coupons or something else creative that you can think of.
What have you recently gotten a bargain on? What negotiating techniques did you use?
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4 users resposed " How to Haggle at Major Retail Stores such as Best Buy & Home Depot "
February 14 2009
Interesting post. I just got back from the Mediterranean, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot. In places like Turkey and Egypt, paying the asking price is so alien that I don’t know what salesmen would do if you tried. Probably stare in disbelief.
I think on one hand, it’s sort of comforting to know where the price will end up, here in the US. I also think that too often the things they sell us are overpriced far beyond normal ideas of profit markup.
I’m interested in hearing what, if any, successes other people have had at it.
February 14 2009
I used to work at Best Buy.. and Office Depot for that matter.. Hanggling at either of these stores will get you no where.
The only way haggling is accepted, is if you speak with the manager, and you are buying a significant amount of product. If you are buying a computer, forget it. The company litterally makes $10-$15.00 off the sale of the computer – that is why the sales employee’s are trained to push other products related to it: Mice, Speakers, Warranties, ect…
February 14 2009
Yeah, I agree that haggling on computers probably isn’t going to get you much of anywhere anymore. Since there’s not a ton of mark up, to me it makes sense to shop online and bargain hunt, rather than to try to negotiate when it comes to buying computers.
March 12 2010
I figure it never hurts to ask. You might be surprised at how much wiggle room you find–especially when you’re talking to salespeople who work on commission. Besides, the article has a good point that in these times, stores are willing to do more to make a sale.
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