On Haggling

A few months ago, I mentioned that we were going to be redecorating our living room. Here's what it currently looks like:


As you can see, it's very cluttered and the furniture doesn't match with the room (because when we moved in, we just threw the furniture that we had in there). The TV is too low, and the entertainment center blocks the window on the wall behind, etc...

We finally made a little bit of progress on this front -- we bought some new furniture to replace all of the crap on that end of the room (surprising, because we never agree on furniture). We got a quote on the furniture, and then went home to discuss and measure the room. After deciding to go ahead with it, I called the salesperson and tried to haggle the price down by about 7%. She said that she would have to talk to her manager and then she would call us back.

She didn't call back for over 2 hours. Now, we had been in the store about 2 hours earlier, and there weren't that many customers. So, I can only assume that the delay in calling us back was because:

1. her manager is hard to get a hold of,
2. she forgot to call us back, or
3. it was a game to find out how eager we were to buy the furniture.

I don't know how these things work, but I reasoned that if we called her back first to find out what the delay was, she would know that we really wanted the furniture, and her counter offer could be higher (or possibly, I'm too eager to spot a conspiracy). In the end, she agreed to the price that asked for.

The furniture isn't going to arrive for another 7-8 weeks, unfortunately. Apparently, the economy isn't working in our favor (they don't have lots of inventory laying around). How could it possibly take that long to get non-custom furniture? I can only assume that amount of time is needed to harvest the wood from some endangered Amazonian rain forest, ship it here in a hermetically-sealed and climate-controlled container, before some carpenters specially flown over from Japan painstakingly hand carve each piece using only tools from the 18th century.