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.

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.