American consumers are great at comparison shopping in order to hunt down the best deal, but despite their desire to save money most never try their luck at haggling. Haggling is time-consuming and sometimes stressful. Consumers have also been conditioned by retailers to accept the sticker price as the final, no-haggle price. Large purchases such as cars and homes have always been the exception, but now with the recession putting pressure on consumers to save money – and on retailers to make sales – Americans are starting to warm up to the practice. The Economist reports:

“According to America’s Research Group, a market-research firm, 72% of American consumers have haggled in the past four months, compared with 56% a year earlier. Britt Beemer, the firm’s chief executive, estimates that they are successful 80% of the time.”

The trend is likely to grow as the recession continues. For retailers, a discounted sale is better than no sale. For consumers, saving money might be worth more than keeping up appearances.

Want to increase your success rate in haggling?

According to Esquire’s Tom Chiarella there is no substitute for practice, practice, practice. Tom made an effort to haggle for anything and everything in his day-to-day life and came up with, “Haggling for Hot Dogs” – a sort of how-to guide for everyday haggling in America. It’s also interesting to note that he wrote this account back in January 2005 – almost four years before our current recession kicked off – so if the retailers of 2005 were willing to cut a deal then surely today’s hard up retailers will be happy to hammer something out.

In an effort to keep East Coast Liberal fresh even when I don’t have time to post I have added a “Latest News” feature that reads from my del.icio.us RSS feed. Setup of this feature was simple using the WordPress plugin, feedList.

CNN is reporting that 24 US soldiers are believed to have committed suicide in January 2009 alone, six times the amount of suicides in January of last year. In 2008 the Army confirmed that 128 soldiers committed suicide, the highest annual rate ever recorded since the Pentagon started tracking the statistic 28 years ago.

“This is terrifying,” an Army official said. “We do not know what is going on.”

Army officials have said that they are taking action with new training and mental health programs designed to help soldiers cope with the hardships of war. Read the full story here.

ArsTechnica has a great report about a Harvard Law professor who, with the help of some of his students, is fighting the RIAA in court. Professor Nesson came to the defense of Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University student accused of file sharing by the RIAA, when Joel could not afford the legal fees himself. Nesson is serving as Joel’s official attorney with the majority of the research and prep work being done by his students.

“The students would quickly mount an ambitious defense, not just of Joel Tenenbaum, but of the claim that the RIAA legal campaign was unconstitutionally excessive and improper.”

Pretty awesome stuff if you ask me. Check out the full article here. Also be sure to check out Joel Fights Back, a site launched by the students involved to help spread the word of Joel’s case.

Taken directly from Bill O’Reilley’s playbook, The Dark Knight flips out on the director of photography for the new “Terminator” movie. CNN has the audio:

Cash rich Chinese are looking eagerly at real estate in the US – now on the market at a discount – as well as other assets such as gold and diamonds from overseas. Chinese companies are buying up high-yield bonds from distressed US companies. From the article:

“Some Chinese are so eager to turn their yuan into other assets that when an online real estate brokerage organized a tour of foreclosure auctions in the United States, it received so many applications that it had to turn away nearly 400 people.

In Shanghai, cash-rich Chinese companies are buying high-yield bonds issued by distressed American companies at a time when many Western investors are steering clear of bonds even from solid companies.”

This trend is likely to have a noticeable affect not just on the Chinese economy but also the US economy.

“Though there are myriad reasons to move capital around, there is also cause for concern: Chinese authorities announced Monday that 20 million migrant workers had lost their jobs. If they do not find new work, these workers could form a volatile class of unemployed.

Even more crucial, Chinese individuals and companies placing more of their money outside China could affect one of the constants of international finance over the last five years: China’s central role in bankrolling American trade and budget deficits.”

This shift adds its own element to the flattening of the world, which, whether good or bad, certainly seems like an inevitability. It will be interesting to see how this trend continues to unfold.

Read the original New York Times article.