Markets like the one in the ancient medina of Tangier offer unique opportunities to interact with locals, like a clever Berber gentleman selling ceramics.
He was an elderly Berber gentleman, no doubt born in the time when Tangier was an international zone.
He welcomed us to his small shop in the city’s ancient medina. My wife was looking for a souvenir, and his collection of ceramics had caught her eye. Stepping out of the alleyway of the market and through his door, our eyes adjusted to the dim light of the shop’s interior.
In a land where the term “old” is measured in millennia, the friendly shopkeeper was part of a bloodline that preceded even the Arabs. Berbers are indigenous to North Africa, and they have called Morocco home for thousands of years. Briefly looking over the store as we entered, I figured it had likely served customers like us for centuries.
The shopkeeper was intent on showing his more expensive rug collection, but we politely declined interest. We were backpacking through coastal Morocco and didn’t have much extra space in our bags. My wife began to browse the ceramics while I further analyzed our surroundings.
The room couldn’t have been more than 12 feet wide and 18 feet deep. Admiring how efficiently his products were organized in such a small space, I listened as the shopkeeper conversed in Arabic with a younger man at the doorway.
The scene in its entirety made me smile to myself. If you give me the choice between wits and conventional intelligence, I am going with the clever man or woman every day of the week. A witty person is resourceful, thinks abstractly, and only needs a limited amount of direction to get the job done. In the event of sudden disaster, a person with wits is the likely survivor.
On the other hand, I have met high IQ types who couldn’t reason their way out of a wet paper bag in a downpour.
The shopkeeper was obviously clever. He had learned over the years to speak at least two languages, and I was willing to bet he also knew French and some Spanish. Probably with very little formal education if any, he had also determined how to use marketing concepts like product placement to his advantage. It only took my wife a short time to find the perfect ceramic amongst his array of offerings, leading us to the time-honored discussion regarding price.
Bargaining for merchandise is expected in marketplaces like Tangier’s medina, and I consider it a sacred practice. Since the dawn of our species, mankind has bought, sold, and traded goods using this very method. Many Westerners balk at the idea of negotiating in foreign marketplaces; I humbly believe they’re missing the point.
While both parties are obviously angling for the better deal, the sequence of offer/counteroffer during a bargain is equally about the exchange of what I believe to be the world’s uniform currency: respect. As the prospective buyer, I am basically saying that I respect the quality of the seller’s goods enough to consider making a purchase.
The seller shows gratitude by giving me an initial price, which is always higher than he or she is willing to accept for the item(s) in question. I demonstrate my respectful willingness to interact further with the merchant by extending a counteroffer, and we spend a short time in conversation until reaching mutual agreement.
I am no psychologist, but I think the loss of traditional interpersonal communication exchanges like bargaining could very well have something to do with the West’s expanding mental health crisis. We are, after all, social creatures. Not social media creatures, to be clear, but in-person, speaking face-to-face, conversational creatures.
Once you’ve done it a few times, you start to realize there’s some gamesmanship involved in a good bargain. The clever shopkeeper was observant enough to pick up on my personal method.
Before we entered the medina, I placed strategic amounts of money in different pockets of my jeans. I do this in markets like the ones found in Morocco for a couple of reasons. One, a pickpocket will only earn a fraction of my cash if he or she is skilled enough to make a lift. The second reason is to give me leverage in the event a merchant is trying to play hardball.
Nothing tilts the scales in your favor like pulling out a wad of small-denomination bills and saying, “But this is all I have. I guess we’ll have to try somewhere else.”
The elderly shopkeeper wasn’t the disagreeable type, but he drove a shrewd bargain. We met in the middle on price, and he laughed knowingly as I pulled money from three of my pockets. Business was concluded, but the moment was not lost on me.
Silhouetted in the centuries-old doorway, he, an aged Berber gentleman born under no flag, and I, a younger man raised in the American Deep South, shook hands. We may have been from worlds apart, but we were now connected by a timeless ritual more distinctly human than perhaps anything else.
He smiled respectfully and said, “We bargain.” The honor was all mine.
Related Content
– Click to read my feature article “Tangier: City of Spies” for a detailed look at the city’s history of espionage.
– Click to view my high-resolution photo collection from coastal Morocco.
– Click to view my high-definition video of the Caves of Hercules near Tangier.