There's a quiet shame many travellers carry: the moment you realise you paid double what a savvier tourist got for that souvenir, and the mock-sympathetic "you paid HOW much?" from a fellow traveller stings. Ben Groundwater, writing in Traveller (Sydney Morning Herald), has an unusual take on this universal haggling guilt — he's stopped caring about it, and he thinks you should too.
His argument starts with the idea of the "local price" — that nebulous figure travellers chase in markets where nothing is labelled, measured by how far below the tourist rate you can push. In haggling cultures, your skill is judged by how close you get to what a local would supposedly pay. Groundwater's verdict: stop chasing it. You are not a local, and you never will be.
The logic is economic rather than sentimental. A stallholder gives discounts to regulars in the hope of repeat business — and you, the tourist, will be gone in two days. There's no incentive for anyone to offer you the local rate, so feeling cheated when you don't get one misunderstands the transaction entirely. More bluntly: if you flew there on a plane, you're almost certainly wealthy by local standards. Arguing over the equivalent of 50 cents with a rickshaw driver in India or a T-shirt seller in Uganda isn't savvy negotiating — it's penny-pinching across a vast wealth gap.
Groundwater isn't advocating clueless spending. He still haggles, and enjoys the theatre of it — the mock horror at the opening price, the back-and-forth with someone who's negotiated their whole life. His advice is to keep a rough sense of what things are actually worth so you're not scammed by multiples, not cents. And there's a built-in safety net: if a price doesn't work for the seller, they simply won't agree to it. The tourist, in this arrangement, is never the one doing the exploiting.
Why it matters for travellers: this reframes overpaying not as failure but as one of the healthier ways tourism money moves. Rather than charity handouts, a few extra dollars in a simple market transaction goes directly to someone who needs it more than you do. If you've paid slightly too much, Groundwater's conclusion goes, you've probably paid exactly enough. For anyone who's ever folded in a negotiation out of politeness and felt like a sucker afterwards — consider this permission to stop apologising for it.
