SUNDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2010 PERSONAL FINANCE
From cars to TVs to patio pavers, learn the tricks of talking your way to a deal. T
BY BOB FRICK
his is the story of how Elena Smonina haggled her way to $4,000 in savings on a home
landscaping project. It begins with an admission: “Gardening was nevermy thing,” says Smonina, a tax manager who lives inMilford, Conn. So she created a challenge for herself:Use 3,000 square feet worth of patio pavers to transform part of her lawninto a geometric wonderland, with raised plant beds for greenery. “My husband thought I was crazy,” she
says. In August she visited her local Lowe’s store and found pavers at just 30 cents each, marked down from $1.50. But only ten were left, so she started calling other Lowe’s stores in her area. “Your other store has them on clearance,” she’d say. “Why don’t you?” Sometimes Smonina would remind the floor manager that it was the end of the season and he’d have to sell them sooner or later. If the floor manager wouldn’t deal, she’d ask to speak to the store manager. Some stores had 100 pavers and some had 1,000, and by reaching the right person and pushing the right buttons, she discovered that they were all ready to deal. Smonina used three tried-and-true
haggling techniques to perfection. But the deck was already stacked in her favor because Lowe’s had had two lousy years before she began her bargaining spree, andmay just barely eclipse its prerecession sales this year. You have the same edge: The shaky economy and anemic retail spending have opened the haggling floodgates. And hard-pressed consumers smell blood. A poll in 2009 by Consumer Reports underscores the trend. It found that more than 66 percent of Americans had tried negotiating during a six-month period last year, and that most consumers who tried won discounts. But we’re still far from a haggling society. The same poll found that only 28 percent of Americans say they haggle either always or often.
Pick the low-hanging fruit The first mistake that newbie
hagglers make is to turn the negotiation into a contest of wills. Says Julie Parrish, haggling expert and chief executive of Coupon Girls: “You want to be sensitive to the fact that people need to make
money.” To that end, the easiest strategy is to
offer merchants a deal that benefits them. Parrish gives two examples of the negotiating power of offering to buy in bulk. She once asked a butcher at the end of a business day for a price break on bulk ground beef “so he wouldn’t have to package it for the next day.”He liked the idea and gave her a break, as did a clerk at a store who was wrestling with a big display of construction paper that was tough for shopping carts to maneuver around. Parrish said she’d buy a cartload to help her out. “You’ve got to make it a value proposition for them.” A retailermay be ready to offer a discount to customers who ask. That is, the purchase price listed on the store floormay be fungible, perhaps the highest of two or even three prices you could pay for the item. Traditionally, you tap the lower price by clipping coupons. But scoring the discountmay be as simple as asking at checkout, “Do you have a coupon for this?” Other examples of low-hanging fruit: floor models (especially those with
dings), seasonal items when the season is ending, and perishable items with a shelf life that’s about to run out. Rick Doble, coauthor of “Cheaper:
Insiders’ Tips for Saving on Everything,” says Americans often miss the most obvious cue that an item is primed for a discount: when it’s on
sale.Most people are just grateful to get the sale price. But Doble says that the sale is a signal that “the price is no longer fixed.” Asking “Could you do any better?” often wins. Or you could ask when the item will next go on sale, then ask for the sale price now. Getting a discount when you drop a
wad of cash can also be easy. Buying a room full of furniture? Booking a cruise or travel package? Often a little nudge brings on a discount or garners some extras. If the seller wants to protect the purchase price, hemay keep the price but throw in free end tables, free delivery or a free rental car. Doble says he always asks for, and usually gets, a room upgrade when booking a hotel. “I love the Internet and services like Priceline, but nothing beats calling a
haggling technique is to bring in one merchant’s advertised price to a competitor and ask, “Can you do better?” Or show a salesperson at a brick-and- mortar store the lower price listed on its Web site. The salesperson probably won’t undercut it, but she mightmatch it, saving you the cost of delivery. Of course, the best products and services to bargain for are those provided by sworn enemies -- for instance, a market with two or three phone and cable providers that are constantly angling for your business and dissing the competition. Every time your contract is up or you see a rate hike on your bill, call the competitor and ask for a better price; then call your current provider and see if it will give you an even better deal. What’s the best attitude to bring to a
negotiation? Should you display the steely resolve of someone negotiating nuclear-weapons disarmament, or the conciliatory tone of a hostage negotiator? Herb Cohen knows. The professional
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM GRAJEK FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
hotel and speaking to the manager,” he says. “It’s the local personnel who know how much wiggle room they have.” Another simple trick: Ask for a discount if you pay cash. This saves the store the cut it has to pay the credit-card company. According to
TrueCostofCredit.com, for example, if you buy an $800 flat-screen TV at a big electronics retailer with an American Express card, your purchase costs the merchant $28. The site lists fees for various purchases using different types of credit cards.
Conduct a reverse auction The ultimate leverage in negotiating
comes when sellers compete to give you the lowest price. Elena Smonina got a deal on her first newcar, a Toyota Camry, by pitting one dealership against another. She didn’t merely quote one dealer’s price to another dealer -- she stood next to the salesman of one car she liked while she had a salesman from another dealership on the phone, playing them off one another. A less dramatic way to work this
Sorting through the many options for photo and video editing I
n the dreams of people who write photo- and video-edit- ing software, we all take time
and care to edit our multimedia output into thoughtfully curated productions that strangers will- ingly sit through. That must be a nice universe in
which to live. Unfortunately, in this one things are a little messier. Picture and movie files pile up on our hard drives just as their ana- log equivalents did in shoeboxes; a photo or video editor for busy home users needs to be more concise than complete. Apple has been providing one
answer to that need since 2004 with its iLife set of multimedia applications; in October it shipped iLife ’11, free on new Macs, and $49 for older models running the 10.6 Snow Leopard release of OS X. Then, in 2008, Microsoft
jumped into the game when it began offering a free array of media and Internet programs un- der its Windows Live brand. Its latest, Windows Live Essentials 2011, shipped for Windows Vista and Windows 7 in September and comes preinstalled on many new computers. Both iLife and Windows Live Essentials do far more than edit photos and videos. Apple’s suite adds the GarageBand music pro- gram, the iDVD disc-authoring software and the blog app iWeb (the last two offer no meaningful changes). A full Windows Live Essentials installation will throw in such optional components as Windows Live Mail, an online file-syncing tool called Windows Live Mesh, the Writer blogging application and Family Safety pa- rental-control software.
it provides scant information about their pricing orwhat sort of books and cards you can order. Apple has a bigger lead in video
ROB PEGORARO Fast Forward
For many home users, Apple’s
iLife and iMovie and Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Movie Maker de- fine these bundles — with the photo applications taking prece- dence.
Apple’s iPhoto does more, over-
all, than Photo Gallery. Its recast interface makes organizing pic- tures a little easier by surfacing such details as the people and geographic locations tagged in a photo that formerly resided in dialog boxes. (As before, iPhoto will offer to label faces for you after you’ve identified a few.) Other functions lost out in Ap-
ple’s iPhoto rearrangement. Two important ones, rotating pictures taken with the camera held verti- cally and splitting “events” (iPho- to’s automatically-generated groupings of photos taken in the same period of time), require additional clicks. And iPhoto ’11 doesn’t offer any new editing tools beyond an extra set of graphic effects. Apple seems to have put most
of its effort into iPhoto’s sharing software. You can use it to post pictures to your Facebook profile, and then watch friends add com- ments while still in iPhoto. If you’d rather stick to print, you can order fancy, but pricey ($2.99 each),
HELP FILE
Q: Can you please explain what “the cloud” is supposed to mean to home computing?
A: Vague references to “the cloud” as some sort of anthropomorphized online being can be confusing. But “cloud computing” is
nothing more than a fancy phrase for having an Internet site host your data and the programs you use instead of keeping them on your computer. Think of how Google Docs
compares withMicrosoft Office: In Google’s set ofWeb-hosted applications, you have nothing to install beyond a browser and can pick up your work from
almost any computer on the Internet—or even many phones. Microsoft’s disk-bound
programs, however, work even when your Internet connection doesn’t. As broadband access becomes
even more widespread, cloud computing will become a more logical choice. But you’ll still have to decide how you feel about such basic issues as storing your data on somebody else’s computer (hint: make sure you can take your data with you easily) and the privacy you’re granted by a cloud service. Keep in mind that in some
cases—such asMicrosoft’s “To The Cloud” ads for programs you
run on your computer—“the cloud” is a meaningless buzzword that is more accurately read as “software.”
Q: The SecuniaWeb site says I have an insecure version of Java, but I can’t get an update to install.
A: Do you use Java these days? If not (its main consumer use on theWeb seems to be crossword puzzles, including this newspaper’s), why not ditch it? I posted directions on uninstalling it in Windows and deactivating it inMac OS X on my blog at
wapo.st/aye4wC.
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AppleCEOSteve Jobs introduced the iLife suite of applications in 2004, which does far more than edit photos and videos.
cards in addition to iPhoto’s usual menu of printed products. Microsoft’s Photo Gallery
doesn’t stress organization, as- suming that you’re usually con- tent to view photos by date. Al- though it catches up to iPhoto with its own face-detection and geotagging features, the latter only lets you type in a place name instead of selecting it from a map. Aside from a red-eye-removal
“letterpress” greeting
tool that, unlike Apple’s, can’t fix every eyeball in a shot at once, Microsoft’s editing features stand on a par with Apple’s. But a “Create” menu hides two thoughtful features absent from its competitor: Panorama stitch- es together multiple photos into a larger, single image, while Photo Fuse lets you merge shots of the same subject to combine their best parts. This year’s version of Photo Gallery expands its sharing op-
tions, but its clunkyFacebook-up- loading feature requires you to log into a Windows Live account first. In a test upload, it volun- teered to make my pictures visi- ble to everyone on the site. Printing remains a weak spot
for Photo Gallery. Although Mi- crosoft gives a choice of five print- ordering sites (CVS, Fujifilm, Snapfish, Kodak and Shutterfly),
editing—among people inclined to put time into that task. With its latest update to iMovie, it may be nearing the depth of features it provided in this program before delivering a rewritten, far simpler version in 2007. The new iMovie ’11 allows you to add slow-motion, fast-forward and instant-replay segments; make far more precise adjustments of the soundtrack (including such silly effects as “Multi-Tune,” which imitates the pitch-distorting tricks of thecom- mercial Auto-Tune program); and even create Hollywood-style trailers to advertise your master- piece. I suspect most users will get
more out of its Themes feature, which includes prefab collections of title screens, visual effects and credits that let you quickly dress up a clip. IMovie ’11 can upload to more
sites than iPhoto, from Facebook to such less-obvious choices as Vimeo and CNN’s iReport. But test uploads toYouTubeandFace- book required two tries to go
through. Windows LiveMovieMaker —
which got a major upgrade just last year—is plainer by compari-
son.There are fewer visual effects to play with and no audio tweaks at all, and it provides no useful layer of organization beyond standard file folders. But to slap together a clip, add
opening and closing credits and upload the file—to Facebook and Yahoo’s Flickr in addition to You- Tube and SkyDrive — this pro- gram will do fine. If only Micro- soft were as open-minded with this program’s mobile-device ex- port options: It comes with pre- sets to save a file for Windows Phone and Zune devices and nothing else, a choice that sug- gests thatMovieMaker’s develop- ers should spend some time out- sideMicrosoft’sRedmond,Wash., campus. Which suite should you get?
Whichever one will run on your computer. But be aware of what features each contender leaves out—and hope that the develop- ers do some judicious borrowing in their next release.
robp@washpost.com
negotiator helped the FBI develop its hostage-negotiation protocols and was involved in the START arms-control talks with the SovietUnion.He’s also the author of “You CanNegotiate Anything.” Cohen says he started negotiating as an insurance claims adjuster and was successful because he admitted he didn’t know anything. By asking for help from the claimant and others, he started negotiations collaboratively. He negotiates for stuff the same way.
His advice: “Always start cooperatively and amicably with a low-key pose of calculated incompetence.” Your trump card, Cohen and others
agree, is walking. If you exit with regret, sad that you couldn’t come to some agreement, you’re giving the store one last opportunity to deal. Sometimes, though, you should leave.
Parrish warns that you need to avoid becoming emotionally attached to an item -- even though a good salesperson will try to weaken your resolve by letting you touch, taste, smell or use whatever it is you’re interested in. “As a consumer you need to dissociate yourself from your emotions,” she says. “After all, a car is just a car. They’ll make more of them.” —Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
6
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