The first time I haggled in a Mexican mercado, I treated it like a math problem. I had a number, the vendor had a number, and I wanted to land closer to mine. I won a few pesos and felt clever.
It took me a while to see what I had missed. In the mercado, the price is the opening of a relationship, not the substance of one. The back-and-forth is how two strangers find out whether they like each other. The regulars do not haggle hardest. They greet, they ask about the family, they get the good tomatoes set aside for next time. The relationship is the discount.
A lot of negotiation in business fails for the same reason mine did: we optimize the number and ignore the relationship the number sits inside. The person across the table is not a variable. They are someone deciding whether you are worth setting tomatoes aside for.
Win the peso, lose the vendor. I have done it. I try not to anymore.
