Bonus

Yes, and, in the case of a place like Vietnam, corporate goods are openly counterfeited so they become something available at small shops. This is true with clothes, books, music, etc. In the larger business models, sellers don’t have agency over their selling prices. They’re reduced to mere middlemen.

A lot of this is old world vs. new world culture in general. Even South of the border, where cultures have been more preserved, there are more shops and carts and little family businesses where this stuff is an option which exists almost nowhere in America now.

Not until I visited Vietnam. We hit it off with our hotel manager, hung out a bunch. He told us it’s part of the culture, you’re supposed to do it. You’re going to get offered the price that’s three times what’s considered reasonable. The third offer should get it where it’s supposed to be and that’s where a reasonable person stops haggling. He said some very unpleasant people always take it too far and people don’t want to do business of any kind with people like that. He also said there’s a different price for foreigners than there is for locals. When we’d go out with him, he’d insist on paying, ostensibly because he’d get that local price. Of course, it’s more complicated because we eventually learned they get kickbacks for bringing customers in.

If you fall in, not so much.

Exactly.

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