From Tuk-Tuks to Talks: Mastering the Opening Move

There is a principle in negotiation that speaks to someone not giving you a good starting point in terms of price range. This is called low/highballing. This can be used ethically but when used unethically, it’s used to ensure you have no leg to stand on in the negotiation. For example, when I was traveling in Bangkok, you could largely negotiate with Tuk-Tuks (bike taxis) for where you wanted to go.

However, the driver might see you’re a foreigner and try and give you a bad number for where you want to go. Twice or even thrice or quadruple the price you need to pay in order to get where you want to go. This ensures that any negotiation you make will NEVER get you back down to a regular number. You’re outside the price range altogether and not in a good way. Any engagement with these people at all will only serve their purposes. Depending on if you actually want to go, your best bet is to say nothing, walk, and find someone who's actually going to be fair in their engagement with you.

The same can be said for ill-formed thinking. If someone wants to try and give you a terrible starting point for a conversation when you’re wanting to take it to a very specific place, it might be better to walk than to engage them with that as the starting point. They might not even know how deeply they are highballing/lowballing the conversation for you because they don’t know anything else which means it’s up to you whether you inform them of their own ignorance and risk them tying that very ignorance to you as the cause … or just walk.

I remember one instance where I approached a woman who I was interested in during my stay in a beautiful city in Mexico. I had been invited to a family gathering. It was her family, not mine. I see her and she and I begin to speak. She starts to move the conversation in a direction for me that is NOT fun nor playful nor does it allow room for improvement. And I tell her in a playful manner, I’m going to walk away because this isn’t a fun direction the conversation is moving in,” however, she didn’t recognize I was sincere in my desire for the conversation to be fun and she kept going until she kept going without me and I was no longer present. I was already in a different room in the house before she realized I wasn’t where she was.

Needless to say, she ended up following me where I decided I wanted to go and eventually the conversation moved in a direction she and I both became happy for it to go in. Walking when someone is negotiating a bad starting point for you puts you in the only position where you might actually be able to get what you want. Otherwise, it’s just better you don’t get what you don’t want instead especially if what you do want was never on the table in the first place.