Low Offers - sometimes they work

Will low offers always be accepted? Of course not. Will they often be accepted? Not too often.

So why make an offer that is low in the first place? Because sometimes they are accepted without any further fuss, and having your offer accepted occasionally might be plenty frequently enough to satisfy you, so go ahead and give it a try.

Also, consider that having your offer accepted when it constitutes a great deal for you is wonderful indeed, even if it's a rare occasion.

Here's an example of making an offer that was especially low for some items of relatively high value:

At a garage sale one day I found nice long square steel tubing of heavy wall construction. This would make for great construction material on a future welding job. It was well worth $100 in a retail store. A fair price would have been $40.

I asked the man how much he wanted for the steel. He didn’t know and asked me for an offer, so I offered him $3. Yes, only $3. Remember, we are frugal shopping here. Saving money on quality stuff is the overall objective.

Anyway, he thought about it for a moment and then accepted my $3 offer. He immediately acknowledged that he didn’t want to have to carry the heavy steel into the backyard again after the sale.

So let’s look at what happened here. He had a frugal buyer that was making low offers, but he didn’t want the sale to slip away. It was clear that he wasn’t as comfortable with negotiating as I was. He was more comfortable with accepting low offers than he was with making a counter-offer.

Before accepting my offer, he probably also reflected on how long he had had the items in storage and how he had never used them. In other words, he noted just how worthless the stuff had been to him, so $3 probably looked better than nothing.

Also, I gave him enough time to reflect on these things, and that provided him with an opportunity to talk himself into the $3 sale. A smart shopper knows when to make an offer, and when to stay quiet to let the seller negotiate with himself. Think of this as a lesson in how to negotiate by not trying all that hard.

Done with Low Offers, back to Frugal Shopping