Go ahead, haggle

By Susan Carpenter

May 17, 2009 12 AM PT

No matter how dire the economy, every woman has a line she won’t cross until she’s forced. For some, it’s premium salon hair care; they’d rather play peekaboo with their roots than move to Supercuts and Suave shampoo. For others, it’s first-run apparel; they’d prefer to wait for a Macy’s sale than paw through the castoffs at Salvation Army.

But what happens once you’ve stretched out your manicure appointments to the limits of social acceptability? After you’ve traded weekends of boutique shopping for occasional jaunts to H&M;? What else can you do when you’ve done without and downgraded to the ascetic standards of a nun?

There’s only so low you can go when it comes to beauty and fashion.

Fortunately, there is another option, and it’s one that a growing number of shoppers are using as the economy darkens: bargaining.

Dickering. Haggling. Negotiating. It’s all the same thing. Consumers are talking down prices to get a better deal.

“Everybody’s looking for innovative ways to save a few dollars. If that means going to a garage sale and haggling a $10 item down to $5, it’s something people are doing right now,” said Pam Goodfellow, senior analyst at BIGresearch, a consumer intelligence firm that, in a 2008 survey, found that 50% of Americans were haggling for better prices on all kinds of products in light of the economy.

Price negotiations are now happening across the product spectrum -- not only for the big-ticket items that have long been the norm, but for beauty care, apparel and other categories once seen as nonnegotiable.

“In the past, people just didn’t want to negotiate because they didn’t want to appear cheap. Now, more people are aware and desirous of negotiating,” said Michael Soon Lee, author of the book “Black Belt Negotiating.”

“Everything in this country is negotiable under the right circumstance,” added Lee, who says he’s been able to negotiate better prices for such items as gasoline, healthcare and groceries.

All it takes is a lot of practice, a little patience and understanding the rules of the game, he contends.

So I decided to test Lee’s theory in the feminine realms of beauty and fashion -- two areas in which I’d never thought to negotiate.

“Clothing is very negotiable,” Lee says. “Almost every retail manager has the ability to discount any item in the store 10 to 15% to keep you from leaving.”

You just need to make sure you’re negotiating with the person who has the authority to discount the price, he said.

You also need to make sure that you begin your negotiation attempts at an appropriate level. According to Lee, the easiest targets for haggling are the places where it’s already expected. Lee suggests garage sales as a good place to start, but, as I was starting my research on a weekday, I headed for the Goodwill in Eagle Rock -- one of my favorite places to score barely worn boys’ clothes for my pants-ripping 6-year-old.

I scooped up a couple of Gap items priced at $3 apiece and headed to the counter, where I asked to speak with the manager. I’d found him, it turned out, so I asked if he could give me a better deal.

“No,” he said flat-out. I was, after all, asking for a discount on $6 worth of items.

“What if I bought three things instead of two?” I offered, attempting to sweeten the deal with another trick -- buying in bulk.

“We don’t discount clothes,” he said.

No ambiguity there. I put the items back and moved on to Eagle Rock Boulevard, where I planned to hit up two less-institutionalized secondhand shops. Twerps, for kids clothes, and Owl Talk, for girl stuff. At both shops, I did the same thing. But this time I actually got the discount -- $1 off $11 worth of boys’ shirts, and $2 off $26 of women’s clothes.

Though $3 off $37 may not seem like much, it was about 8% off the list price. Not so bad.

Emboldened, I decided to try mainstream retail (my local CVS) and beauty products (a $27 bottle of Biolage shampoo). I stepped to the counter with the liter bottle and asked for the manager.

“Can you give me a better price on this?” I asked.

“We don’t do that,” he said, looking uneasy.

“Why not?” I countered, as if asking for this sort of discount were routine.

“Human resources,” he said. “It would look like we’re hooking people up with a special deal.”

Fair enough. I put the bottle back and moved on.

At the Aveda store at Glendale Galleria, the salesclerk nearly dropped her tray of tea when I asked for a price break on the $26.50 listed for the liter bottle of Shampure.

“We don’t do that,” the woman said. “Not at the corporate store level.”

That said, she did tell me I might find a better deal at a salon that uses Aveda products.

A curious byproduct of asking for a discount is that you learn other money-saving tips. Every time I had been denied a discount, I was given advice on how I could save money. At the CVS, for example, I was told the store often honors expired coupons. At the Goodwill, I learned I’d just missed a sale on the very items I was trying to purchase. I had no idea Goodwill even held sales.

Some people are innate hagglers. But I found it pretty awkward to ask strangers for discounts. That discomfort was nothing, though, compared with asking for bargains from my dentist, dermatologist and hairstylist. There, with people I’d been seeing for years, I felt like a beggar.

When I asked my dentist if she could knock $5 off a $65 bottle of Oxyfresh tooth whitener, she sounded embarrassed for me.

“We don’t make a huge profit on that,” she told me. “I wouldn’t dicker over $5.”

In my mind, it wasn’t $5 I wanted but 8% off. Still, I felt like a moron for asking -- and that in itself was a valuable lesson. Don’t negotiate unless you can handle the rejection.

My experience didn’t surprise G. Richard Shell, professor of negotiation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and author of “Bargaining for Advantage.”

“I’d be very careful when you have a personal service and you’re a repeat customer and you have to ask for something in a way that embarrasses the owner,” Shell said.

“If you want to get a discount on a haircut,” he added, “go to a new shop you’ve never been to before.”

So I called around to salons to gauge prices and to see if they’d cut me any slack as a new client. Gamine in Silver Lake offered to include me in model nights, when I could get my hair cut and colored for free. Crop in Highland Park was willing to give me $8 off a cut and color, a 7% discount.

Kind as those offers were, my problem was this: I didn’t want to break up with my hairstylist of a decade. So I chickened out and just approached her as a journalist to ask if any of her clients were asking for lower prices.

“I haven’t had that happen yet,” said Taylor Lucas, owner of the Lucas salon in Echo Park. Though she recently traded a haircut for a dress from a customer who had fallen on hard times and says she is open to the idea of negotiating with other clients, she’s also leery.

“If somebody said, ‘I got laid off and have no money and I need to look good for my job interview,’ I’d be fine with that,” said Lucas, 29. “But it’s a weird thing. Do we do the same deal next time? What if they start working again? . . . It kind of is a little tricky.”

I have no intention of negotiating with her. Personally, I’d rather draw out the periods between my hair appointments than ask for a deal, which is exactly what I’m doing.

Too bad that trick can’t be applied to a daily skin care regimen. I don’t use a lot of product, but I’ve convinced myself I’ll look my actual age unless I double dip on the Kinerase intensive eye cream, which costs $59 for a 7-ounce tube and lasts me about three months.

To me, that price is high, but I hadn’t ever balked at the bill. That changed when I called to ask my dermatologist for a better deal. To my surprise he offered me a free tube of my usual goo if I also agreed to buy a more expensive replacement product for $85. He said I could also get 25% off all my future anti-aging skin cream purchases.

All because I’d asked.

“If you try, you’ll succeed more often than you don’t,” Shell said. “What’s different these days is the market has shifted so the consumer has more prospects for success.”

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Ready to bargain? Michael Soon Lee, author of “Black Belt Negotiating,” has tips to get you started. Step 1: Ask.