Salesmanship

Throughout our married lives, Christy and I have made a few expensive purchasing decisions that, although we frequently needed or wanted to buy something like the thing we ended up buying, was not really what we should have gotten:

• We walked into a piano store one time, “just to look”, and walked out owning an expensive digital piano. Knowing what I know now about sales techniques, we were totally “gamed” into buying it. I often think that I’d have been perfectly satisfied with a piano that looked less “nice” and had a lot more functionality, synthesizer-wise. It’s water under the bridge now, but I still feel conned, nearly ten years later.
• We bought a used car that was overpriced and under-performing. We’d had an immense amount of car trouble with a particular ancient Buick, Christy was many months pregnant, it was summer, and the salesman took advantage of the situation. Again. We ended up trading that one in, and the value was so far underwater that it took us a long time to ever come close to breaking even on value on our subsequent vehicle.
• We attended a timeshare presentation, and got pressured into buying that evening. Although I don’t regret the purchase (much) since it’s been a source of a good deal of family vacation time, I often look at how low the prices are from people selling their shares online and think “if I’d only known that I could buy them used, I could have saved an awful lot of money”.

Finally, last year I read a very good book. Inflence: Science and Practice, by Robert Cialdini. He details what the patterns of influence are in society, and the principles behind so many of our automatic responses to certain situations. That free popcorn and hot dogs at the local furniture store isn’t truly “free”, because in eating it, you invoke a very deeply-programmed response to act charitably toward those who have done a favor for you without thought of recompense. This increases your buying probability.

It’s not something that works all the time, but it works a large enough percentage of the time. Think about some of these situations which are very common today:

• The door-to-door cleaner salesman offers to clean your toilet for you, absolutely free. That act of cleaning your toilet indebts you to the cleaner salesman, thus improving your chances of buying.
• That same salesman will often give a sob story about he/she is from “the ghetto” and “working to pull myself up by my bootstraps”. They thus invoke every person’s fundamental sense that they themselves are a good, charitable person, and that buying this guy’s cleaning product is the way to reinforce that self-perception.
• The car salesman, before committing to a price, tries to get you to put a signature on a piece of paper, with a question like, “is this a price at which you’d buy this car?” This reduces your chances of backing out, even though you know that signature is nothing legally binding. It’s often on a vaguely official-looking “form” that says nothing at all, really. But once you’ve put your signature down, to back out after putting a name in writing makes one appear inconsistent. Humans have a very deep-seated need to be consistent in our past and present actions; to be very inconsistent or unpredictable in behavior is one definition of “crazy”.

Learning from poor purchasing decisions has radically changed the way I now approach any large purchase. These days, I look at what it is I want from something (feature-wise), figure out exactly how much I’m willing to spend in order to get those features, after a great deal of online research, and then begin hunting down vendors who will sell to me at that price. We’ve bought two vehicles using this method, avoiding “salespeople” until we’ve already made the decision to buy at a particular price, and have been pleased with the outcome.

Learning to say “no” has been a long and difficult road, but very personally rewarding.

There’s one purchase that is much larger than any of the others, that many of us have already embarked upon: a house. Christy and I own our home (well, really, we own 9% of our home… the bank owns the rest). That decision worked out for the best, though I think not getting ripped-off partly luck at that clueless and gullible stage of my life. We found a home in our modest price range, got a low-pressure sales presentation by a local builder, and after looking at a bunch of homes decided to go with this particular seller. Though it hasn’t been all roses (particularly, our home’s resale value was in the toilet for several years due to the depression of 2001-2004), we’ve been pleased with our little home.

Unfortunately, even in the home-buying market, there are enterprising realtors who do not hesitate to “game” you into buying something you can’t afford and don’t want. The real-estate industry has its share of hucksters who will do anything they can get away with to get you to buy one of their homes.

If you own a home, how did you go about making your home-buying decision? If you were to do it again, what would you do differently? If you haven’t bought one yet, how do you plan to approach it?