Basket buying in Arab Street (Singapore)

When I was leaving Singapore for London, I decided to ship all my personal belongings over, not daring to risk them being thrown out in my absence, knowing my family.  

My shipping agent said as I was paying for one-sixteenth of a container anyway, which was the minimum space I could hire, I might as well fill it up.  Knowing rattan baskets would be expensive, if not hard to come by, in the West, I went off to Arab Street where there were shops selling nothing else but baskets.

I’d been primed on the tactics of shopping.  

Step 1:  drop the asking price by 50%, and slowly bargain up towards the final price, which should be 75% of the opening offer.  

If Step 1 fails, put on an air of nonchalance and walk away with a breezy, “I’ll go elsewhere!”  This should panic the shopkeeper into calling you back with a lower price.

At the first basket shop, as I was applying Step 1, I noticed a white man in the verandah, more interested in tuning in to my bargaining gambits than in examining the baskets hung up in the verandah, even though he was trying to be surreptitious about it.

Step 1 failed after a bit of a brave tussle on my part, so I played my Step 2 card.  The shopkeeper’s response was an equally breezy, “OK, you do that.  You’ll find that you can’t get a lower price than what I’ve just offered you.”  Even if I could believe him, it was too late for me to backtrack, so I walked away without a backward glance, head held high.

At the second shop, the lowest price was indeed still higher than the lowest offered at the first.  Oh dear.  Never mind, there were more shops along the verandah.  Same results at the third shop, the fourth shop, the fifth.

Finally, I had to go back to the first shop.  The shopkeeper was standing bang in the middle of the verandah, feet apart, arms akimbo, head tilted back so that he was looking down his nose at me with a smile that stretched from one ear to the other.  Worse, the white man was standing next to him, obviously looking forward to the next stage of the battle that was about to be played out right under his big Western nose.

“Well?  What did you find out?” asked the shopkeeper.  As if he didn’t know!  “What did I tell you??”  Honestly, some people do so relish rubbing salt into the wound!  Swallowing my pride, I had to tell him that he was right, and bought what I wanted from him.

As I was about to leave with whatever smidgen of dignity I had left, the white man asked, “Excuse me, you’re not local, are you?”

“What makes you say that?”

He said, “Because you are so bad at bargaining.  The moment you opened your mouth the first time, I knew you were going to lose this battle.  When you walked off to the other shops, the shopkeeper said to me, ‘She’ll come back.  Just you see.’  And sure enough, you did.”  


How humiliating is that, I ask you?!?

(Singapore, 1977)