I was on my way to my first negotiation assignment from my Stanford LEAD class about negotiation: start a negotiation in a place where negotiation is not expected. I’d never done something like this before.
I’d done the research. I knew the exact price, my alternatives, that no discounts were listed.
I arrived, walked the aisle, and stood in front of the salesperson. Simple ask: the item, plus a discount. The system did not allow a discount on that item. It was not that the salesperson did not want to help, there were other blockers around what I was asking for. We circled for a few minutes and got nowhere, then they offered something else, not a discount, but still useful to me. I raised my offer and asked for more.
I didn’t expect to get that far. The result was a win-win. I got more of what I wanted; they sold a higher-value item and kept the sale.
This was an applied activity from Chapter 1 of Getting (More of) What You Want by Margaret Neale and Thomas Lys (“Why Aren’t You Negotiating? The Choice to Negotiate”).
Lesson: most people avoid negotiating because they see it as a battle with winners and losers, and because of confirmation bias (accepting the idea that something simply isn’t negotiable). Reframe it as collaborative problem-solving, and asking stops feeling wrong. Negotiation isn’t only for the big stuff (jobs, contracts, big purchases). It works in ordinary interactions too.
The cost was a few minutes of awkwardness and self-doubt. The upside was unknown until I tried.