The art of negotiation

Most things in Burkina Faso are negotiable, including taxi rides, food, appliances and clothing, to name a few. As a white person (‘nasara’) we can expect the starting price to be three times the real price…which means buying the simplest item takes quite a bit of time, patience and negotiation.

I’ve discovered that westerners living in West Africa take two different approaches to negotiating; they either negotiate passively and pay a premium, or negotiate until they get the African price.

The thinking behind the passive negotiator is that prices aren’t that high anyway, and the vendors don’t make a lot of money, so paying an extra 30 cents for a pineapple is ok (especially for those foreigners enjoying strong home currencies). My wife, and generally all the other nice people I know, fit into this first category.

I (Jon), on the other hand, have adopted the motto, “It’s either the African price, or I’m going elsewhere.” I have a desire - perhaps too big of a desire - to be treated equally and my thinking is that no-one really benefits if you teach someone they can inflate the price on you. The art to this type of negotiation is to keep bargaining until the vendor is happy to let you walk away…then you know you’ve hit the real price (or just under).

You can then go back and buy the item or know for next time what the real price is. The biggest pitfall to this approach is that by refusing to budge you can make life exceptionally difficult for the sake of a dollar (like the time I knocked back a reliable taxi ride to the bus terminal for the sake of $1.50, only to spend a whole afternoon and night wondering whether the cheaper taxi would actually pick us up from our house in the morning).

Interestingly, if the competition watchdog operated in Burkina, it would have to close down many corner stores, because they collude. Vendors are known to work together to protect their premiums. All vendors in a given radius selling the same type of product will almost always have the same ‘real’ price (finding it is the difficult thing)…and they will never undercut another seller. This means you end up with 10 people crowding around you all selling a big bag of peanuts for $2.50, refusing to budge on their price.

I actually think this is a good thing because you do hear of sad stories of people being severely underpaid – in an environment of rising food and petrol prices – because a low-paid job is better than no job. And with so many fruit and vegetable sellers, there is so much power with the buyer that they can potentially negotiate their way to an unfair price.

Jon