Negotiating Culture: Conflict and Consensus in U.S. Garage-Sale Bargaining

Abstract

Although bargaining is often used in the purchase of high-priced items, Americans are ambivalent about the practice of haggling. The U.S. garage sale is one of the few venues where numbers of Americans bargain for low- to moderately priced goods, but common understandings about garage-sale bargaining are unevenly shared among American participants, who are accustomed to fixed-price merchandise. Students and foreign-born participants from cultures with more robust bargaining styles afford a contrast with the preferred American pattern of socially engaged bargaining, allowing the underlying normative patterns and strategies for American garage-sale bargaining to emerge. The polarization that can ensue from bargaining negotiations also highlights the underdocumented cultural values of friendliness and pleasantness that ideally surround commercial transactions in the United States. (Bargaining, United States, garage sales) ********** This article addresses bargaining in the U.S. garage sale, one of the few places in America where shoppers and sellers haggle for low- to moderately priced goods. Although it is not representative of mainstream economic practices, garage-sale bargaining does shed light on American values surrounding economic exchange and on the American ambivalence toward the practice of bargaining itself. The blatant vying for material advantage in bargaining reveals a set of values that, although always present in commercial transactions, are usually muted by the convention of fixed prices and an aura of pleasantness attendant to store purchases. The garage sale provides a site in which to explore the tensions in U.S. exchange between the socially affirming and egalitarian on the one hand, and the individual maximizing and unequal on the other, and to come to appreciate how the relative balance in the exchange shifts. Bargaining practice both reflects the veneer of friendliness of daily commercial transactions and at times lays bare the struggle for advantage that often underlies exchange. This examination of small-scale bargaining, sometimes over nickels and dimes, complicates the essentialized depiction of the West as a thoroughly rationalized economic system (Carrier 1992), affording a more nuanced picture of American exchange, and provides a unique ethnographic statement about this practice. The focus here is on the cultural aspects of garage-sale bargaining, although factors such as gender and class can also be important in bargaining practice (Herrmann, In press). This essay demonstrates that particular American patterns of garage-sale bargaining exist, if unevenly accepted, and are practiced with considerable inter- and intracultural variation. Roughly stated, there is a circumscribed range of culturally tolerated bargaining behavior and those who transgress these boundaries may be viewed as aggressive, self-serving, and even greedy. This essay also contributes to the growing body of literature on cultural economics (e.g., Gudeman 1986; Wilk 1996), particularly in the West, where the overarching market paradigm obscures t l? social relations and cultural components of economic exchange (e.g., Carrier 1997, 1998; Dilley 1992; Plattner 1996), and to the literature on the sociocultural construction of price in Western exchange (Alexander 1992; Geismar 2001; Prus 1985). After introducing the social and cultural context of the garage sale, the essay presents factors that influence bargaining there: polarization; paradigms and patterns; and pride, performance, and play. Many recent anthropological treatments of bargaining utilize an information approach, in which buyers and sellers have differential access to information, to understanding the practice (e.g., Alexander and Alexander 1987; Fanselow 1990; Geertz 1979). According to the information model, one quite familiar to Western consumers, shoppers engage in an extensive search for standardized or homogeneous goods, seeking the best price for fungible goods from a number of venders. …