Low-balling

I’m going to make today’s post relatively short, because I’m on holidays and have to put in a lot of effort tonight if I’m going to finish my new Wii game. The topic I want to talk about is called ‘low-balling’ – no, I’m not talking about when old men wear loose shorts. I’m talking about a technique that salesmen use, which you’ve probably encountered on a few different occasions.

 Let’s imagine we’re in a shop, buying something that we consider to be fairly important; say, an mp3 player. Bewildered by the array of shiny screens and lack of content on any of the display models, we reluctantly ask a sales assistant for their opinion, already anticipating that it will leave us just as uninformed as we were to begin with. After some mumbling and confusion, we choose the iPod, because that’s what all the cool kids are going for these days. Our friendly sales assistant tells us the price, we nod our heads in agreement, and then they retreat to the back of the shop to check the stock.

Whether they were checking the stock or not, it wouldn’t be that surprising for them to come back and spout out something like, “the price is going to be (insert original price plus €10) because of the (insert business jargon) cost. This, my friends, is us getting low-balled. After we agree to the initial price, the increase doesn’t seem like a big step up from the first offer, so we ignore the sales assistant’s sly move and treat the increase as a probable ‘miscalculation’ that they ‘forgot’ to mention. It’s a form of the ‘foot-in-the-door principle’, where you start off by asking somebody for a small favour, gradually increase the magnitude of that favour, and then eventually lead to the ‘big’ favour, which you had planned all along. You’re basically provoking the reaction of, “ah fuck it, I already did that other thing, I might as well just do this as well”. It’s a simple, yet surprisingly effective technique to pull off. Keep kicking the summer’s ass and try it out on some unsuspecting siblings or friends…and don’t let yourself be the victim of it anymore!