Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Bit Bucket: Ramping up for a Battle

tiffanyb:

Whew. Real Estate is a weird world that I don’t understand. It has a language all it’s own (is it fully available? Can we pull the permits on that? Is the basement English, or just partially English? What are the contingencies?) that makes it a bit intimidating just on the face.

There’s that, but what I was unprepared for is how much strategy and psychological warfare there is involved in buying a house.

In order to make an offer on a house that you can even bother hoping will get accepted, you have to think through with what the seller will counter with, whether you’ll be willing to accept this counter-offer, whether you think your escalation clause (the thing that says how much more you’d be willing to pay than what you actually offered, like eBay, except the seller gets to SEE it, so it’s basically a piece of paper that says “this is how much you can ACTUALLY get out of us”) will be used as intended or just used to fuel the counteroffer, whether you think other buyers will be stronger or weaker than you, etc. 

What other purchase in life is like this? Maybe buying a car? I took my dad with me when I bought my first car, and the salesman who sold me the Beetle was a friend of a friend, so I really don’t know.

But I know I have never needed a battle strategy for PURCHASING something before. When I walk into a grocery store, I walk the aisles, finding the items I intend to purchase. Perhaps a little research is involved here in terms of unit pricing and reading nutrition labels, but it comes down to putting the loaf of bread and the jar of peanut butter in the basket, walking to the checkout counter, handing money to the clerk, and having the clerk hand ME the loaf of bread and the jar of peanut butter. THIS is my mental model of a commercial transaction.

I do not say to the clerk, “I will pay $3.59 for this jar of peanut butter, but if others in the store are also interested in this peanut butter, I will go as high as $4.25.” I do not ask myself whether my choice of paper, plastic, or reusable bag will make me a more or less attractive potential buyer of the peanut butter.

I don’t go to flea markets because I hate haggling.

I am utterly unequipped for this process.

The last time I tried to negotiate a price for something was December, 1992. I was 19 years old. We had just finished a mission trip in Harmons, Jamaica (a 6 hour van ride into the mountains on a “road” that was very close to the edge of a “side of a mountain” where we could easily “die” I’m not sure why I’m putting any of that in quotation marks).

We went down into the “touristy” area of Jamaica near Ocho Rios and went into something like a craft fair/flea market. We were told that prices were inflated because haggling was to be expected.

I wasn’t really all that interested in buying anything, but wandered around for a little while. Several of the vendors tried to get your attention. Sometimes I’d wander over and take a look, but wasn’t interested in much of anything, so I mostly kept moving.

There was one particularly friendly vendor who was selling shirts. Some of them had some pretty wild designs on them, and were in that realm of “so bad they’re good”. We talked about a few of them (basically me saying I wasn’t interested, and him showing me more shirts that he had for sale and offering a better price each time). Finally, I left saying that if I could find my girlfriend (now @WifeOfTJ) and she liked one of them, I’d buy one.

A few minutes later I found her, brought her over, and she reacted with a combination of disgust and horror at them. I believe the word “hideous” was used. The seller was with another customer at the time and couldn’t hear us, so we just kept walking around.

After he was done with his customer, he tracked me down to see if she liked them. When I said that she didn’t, he threatened to come after me with a machete.

Completely true story.