There's always room to haggle

For anybody interested in a subscription to the Vancouver Sun, I just got the phone callers to drop their quoted rate to $9.99 / month which includes the Vancouver Sun and access to their pay online services.

Here's how it went down:

Dude calls me up and offers a promotional rate of $17 a month. I said no; the student rate I paid before was alot cheaper.

He then offered to match the price he had on file, $14/month, with the ability to freeze the rate at this price for as long as I continue the subscription. I still said no. There was a reason I dropped the subscription before at that price point.

As a last resort, he offered a price of $9.99/month which included access to their pay online services, also with the ability to freeze this rate for as long as I continue to subscription. While vaguely tempting, I still said no.

Now the person I talked to claimed he was one of the supervisors and so had the power to authorize these discounts. He also said that these prices are strictly only available with outbound calls (they call you, not you call them).

So keep the $9.99 price in mind if somebody from the Sun calls and you have an interest in receiving a newspaper instead of getting all your information through other means.

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I suppose the lesson is that there's always room to haggle, especially for services. Just don't be a jerk about it; nobody likes to give a jerk a free ride. A few other situations where I was able to receive a lower price come to mind:

• Buying golf clubs? I got Riverside golf to give me what worked out to be about a 20% discount when I bought a set of clubs for Christmas. Granted, they were used clubs, so that may have made a difference.
  
  
• Going to the orchestra? When I was in Vienna I bought some tickets to the orchestra from a street vendor. Convinced him to throw in a free drink (wrote a note on the back of the ticket and signed it).
  
  
• Switching phone providers? When I left Fido some years ago, they offered to give me 2 months on my current plan for free as well as a new cell phone. I stayed with Fido for another 2 months before I switched to Rogers.