The Art of Negotiation

You all know that Lisa, Mica and I take an annual trip (or two!) to one of our favorite places in the country…New York City! We have absolutely mastered the art of negotiating for anything in Chinatown (and yes, Mica and I did just fine without Lisa this year, although Lisa still claims to be the best negotiator of the three of us). Well, last weekend, Lisa and I got to play that role…in reverse! We had a garage sale Friday and Saturday morning and we had a blast. We are both so much alike, it’s kind of scary. We are both just anal enough that we get along, but I’m pretty sure that if anyone else tried to count the money or keep up with the sales, we would not be impressed. It is not easy to count items, count dollars, keep up with whose Texas A&M Beta Alpha Psi t-shirt just sold and whose is still on the rack, write down the sale in the correct person’s column, etc. But, I can assure you that we did pretty dang good! In total we made about $1,000 and after reconciling our cash to the list we kept of my sales versus her sales, we were only $3.60 off…now that’s an anal accountant or two if I’ve ever known one!

Now, I know it sounds like $1K is a lot of money…and it is, we were pleased, but I’ve had people saying that we must have ripped people off for that amount of money. BUT NO…trust me when I say we should have had a sign out front that said, ‘Everything for $1 sale’ b/c Lisa wanted literally everything to be ONE DOLLAR. Geez! I had to fight her to get a few items at $2 and $3. I did get my way on a few things being a little more ‘pricey’ and I did have a guy ask me if I was trying to make a profit b/c the two items that he wanted happened to both be $3 each…how dare I try to make a profit on a garage sale! Go away bozo! Anyway, Lisa and I were a good team when it came to reading people. She had a ton of kids toys and when someone would try to come up and negotiate the price down from the super low price they were already at, Lisa would act as if she was contemplating it and I would come in with, ‘Well, I don’t know, I mean the boys REALLY liked that toy. They play with it a lot.’ Then Lisa could agree and the buyer would think it was a ‘great’ buy and end up going for it.

Overall, it was a nice relaxing two days b/c the weather was absolutely perfect, we were cleaning out our houses and making money! Friday went so well, that Friday night we both made another round through our houses to make sure we couldn’t get rid of anything else…and we found plenty more to add to the sale on Saturday. So, the funniest story of the weekend was me having a ‘blonde’ moment. There are always lots of Mexicans that come to these sales and about half of them don’t speak English. Well, this sale was no different except you add to it lots of Chinese people that don’t speak English that well either. You would think that holding up one finger or two fingers is universal for $1 or $2 but apparently not. So, after multiple times of me saying the words ‘uno’ and ‘dos’ (b/c again we had very few items over those prices), I got a little confused. There was a man who came up to me, I couldn’t understand him and he began drawing circles in his hand trying to help me out. I had no clue what he was saying so I attempted to help him out and say, ‘dose’ and hold up two fingers. He gave me this smirky look, chuckled at me and walked off. I was kind of offended, thinking that I was just trying to help the man out and all he did was basically laugh at me. Well, come to find out…he was Chinese not Mexican…oops! My bad! In my defense he was old and Lisa even admits they all start looking alike when they get old…