The Oriental Carpet Buyer

This is an article that we dug up from 1998 by Laura Billings for Salon.com: If there is something missing from the American Shopping Experience — and if you’ve been to the Mall of America, as I have, you know not much has been overlooked — it is the act of bargaining. Not buying a bargain, a blandly experienced purchase of an item whose price has merely been called back to our atmosphere (i.e., “I saw these $400 shoes marked down to $39.99 and I had to have ‘em!”). No, I mean the act of bargaining, in which buyer and seller come together in the great mambo of marketing, which, in the best cases, makes each leave the exchange satisfied they’ve ripped off the other just a little bit. Bargaining may be disappearing from our commercial landscape (witness the rise of Saturn dealerships), but it lives on in the rest of the world. This is, in large part, why we travel.

Not long ago, a friend called to invite me on a cheap, off-season tour of Turkey. She promised that I would see the ruins of Ephesus and the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia, that I would wake each morning to the sound of the Muslim call to prayer and go to bed each night with a belly full of aubergine. Yeah, whatever, I said, just as long as I get to buy a rug. The truth was that ever since I bought my first car and was introduced to the delirious back-and-forth of negotiating, I had dreamed of going toe-to-toe with the guys who invented the dealer showroom. Since flying carpets were our first automatic conveyance — and if you’ve read “The Arabian Nights” or seen “Aladdin” you know this is true — rug merchants were actually the world’s first automobile salesmen.

And they’re outstanding salesmen, living as they do in the busy confluence between Europe and Asia, a ripe spot for studying humanity and perfecting the first salesman credo: Tell the customers what they want to hear. On my first day in Istanbul, I nearly fell prey to a green-eyed charmer who accosted me in the Kapali Carsi, the famous covered bazaar that holds more than 4,000 shops. (Take that, Mall of America!) “You are a great beauty,” he said so wolfishly that it was clear the antiseptic threat of harassment charges hadn’t drifted into this pungent corner of the world. “You must be Italian.” Actually, I’m a poster girl for the corn-fed Midwestern look, and was so pleased to be deemed continental that I was opening my wallet when my Turkish tour guide dragged me away.

(read more)