Negotiating in the Deep Freeze

Abstract

Some years ago, my wife and I responded to an advertisement from a frozen meat company to buy a quarter or a half of beef at a particularly attractive price. When we went to the company, it turned out that the particular meat advertised was not available, as one might expect, but there were other very interesting deals to be cut if we would only discuss them a little further. To discuss them, we were invited to go and look at the cuts of meat, which were hanging in, of all places, the deep freeze. We entered the cold storage area and confronted a number of different carcasses of beef and were told about their qualities. My wife and I were quite surprised by this; we had come to buy the advertised products and we didn’t quite know what to do. So when presented with the salesman’s offer, rather than revealing our surprise, we turned to each other and discussed the matter—in French, since my wife is French. This confused the salesman, who did not understand what we were saying, and so he lowered the price. Now we were faced with a double decision to make: not only whether we wanted to buy a different kind of beef—a bargain—but at what price we wanted to buy it. And so we conferred again in French. At that point the salesman again lowered the price. We found this surprising, but we were beginning to catch on. We then discussed the interesting evolution of events, to which he again responded by lowering the price, looking more and more flustered and surprised. By the third round, the dynamics of the situation had become obvious to us, and we turned and discussed them, again in French. That produced the same effect, which we then discussed. By the end of the encounter we were rather cold, but we had also lowered the price of beef significantly below the original offer, without saying a single word in English to the salesman. We walked off with our quarter of beef at a real deal, having successfully bargained with silence.