Part 1: Haggling & Negotiation skills.

I am one of those who do horribly at haggling. Not only do most Australians not haggle, its not in their cultural practice, or expectations to do so. So obviously, during my time in Australia, I totally lost ANY skills of haggling (if I ever had any) to about almost ZERO. I might be exaggerating, but as far as I know, I haven't seen any Australians doing that....

So imagine my surprise when I started my experience at the current workplace (where I have to do the dirty work of tele-selling exhibition space to very typical china-apek/ "chinaman" (a term for someone who is thrifty in spending money) managers. You could say that I was almost a "jakun" (malay term for equivalent in Australian terms for 'someone from the bush') in the haggling department.

Apparently most Malaysian china-man put up their initial price (which is HEAVILY marked up) and then start negotiations from there. Then when they give their sales pitch to customer, they waive this (and waive that), so that in the end, the customers feel like they were given a BIG discount. Not to mention, it is also a cultural practice of a lot of the business people to haggle & bargain on the printed price which is given.

A week or two after I started my venture into the world of tele-sales, I so happened to be in this shopping mall where there was a fitness club, FF. Since both my friend, Asta & I were in need of overhauling our image in terms of spring cleaning the "fats" area, we decided to just drop by the fitness club.

It was indeedly strange, as the salesperson showed us this placard which had the price of the joining fee & administration fee & monthly fee which came up to about RM600+. We were a bit shocked, as it was really a bit too much to even join. I remember rightly a few years back that I didn't even pay a single cent to pay any such thing... so we told the salesperson, Joanne, that we were previously members.

Joanne then proceeded to contact the Centre Manager for a while (supposedly had a discussion lar), and then she informed us that our joining fee & administration fee was *MAGICALLY* waived (with a wave of a hand)...... saying too that that offer was only GOOD FOR THAT DAY.. (which anyone with half-a-brain should know that that is a 'sales gimmick' to lure in naive customers like us to make a sale. hahahaha).

The end result was no, I ended up not enrolling for the fitness club membership of RM195 as it was just too much of a hassle to go a gym after work (traffic jam, blah blah blah). Instead, a week later, I headed to Fitness Concept to get a set of dumbbells weighing a good number of kilos to work out at home. (that came up to only RM35 and will last me for a very long time... ). ^^

Speaking of which, with the economy downturn, it seems that the Australians might be rethinking of haggling after all... till then, later!