By If you’ve ever bought anything in a souk, you already know how this works.
You pick up a lamp, or a rug, or a leather bag you didn’t come in for. You ask how much. The seller looks at you, looks at the bag, and says a number. And from that second on, the whole conversation is about that number. You can laugh at it. You can walk away and come back an hour later. It doesn’t matter. Every price you say afterwards gets measured against it.
Say he started at 800 dirhams and you walk out paying 400. You feel like you won. You halved it. Maybe the bag was worth 150. Nobody will ever tell you.
He didn’t just make an offer. He handed you the ruler.
Before I explain what’s going on, try this. It takes about thirty seconds.
::interactive::
What you just went through has a name: anchoring. The first number you see sticks, even when it has nothing to do with anything. Even when you know it has nothing to do with anything.
One of my favorite experiments on this was run at MIT. Dan Ariely and two colleagues asked students to write down the last two digits of their social security number. Then they auctioned off ordinary things: bottles of wine, a cordless keyboard, a box of chocolates. The students whose digits were high bid far more than the ones whose digits were low, often three times as much or more.
Everyone in that room knew their social security number had nothing to do with the price of a keyboard. It moved their bids anyway.
You might think experts are immune. They aren’t. In a study from the eighties, real estate agents were shown around a house and given a pack of information about it, including the listing price. Different agents saw different listing prices. Their professional estimates of what the house was worth moved in the direction of whatever price they’d been shown. And when they were asked afterwards what had influenced their estimate, most of them didn’t mention the listing price at all.
That’s the unsettling part. The anchor doesn’t feel like an anchor. It feels like your own judgment.
Once you know this, you start seeing anchors everywhere.
The restaurant menu has one dish near the top that almost nobody orders, at a price almost nobody pays. It isn’t there to sell. It’s there so the second most expensive thing looks sensible. Software companies do the same with the enterprise plan, the one that says “contact us” or costs ten times the others. Almost nobody buys it. It makes the middle plan look like a bargain.
The “was €200, now €99” label works the same way. The €200 may never have been a real price. It doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be the first number you see.
It works in salary negotiations too. Research on negotiation keeps finding the same pattern: whoever puts the first number on the table tends to pull the final deal toward it. Which is why recruiters love asking what you earn now.
I work in marketing, and I’ll admit this is one of the first tools we reach for. Not because we’re villains. Because it works on everyone, including us. Knowing about anchoring helps a little. Mostly it means you notice it happening to you slightly after it’s too late.
The part that matters more than the trick, I think, is this. A discount is a confession about the first price. Somebody decided what you’d put up with, then let you feel clever for paying less. The satisfaction you feel at the till is part of the product.
So what do you do with this? You can’t switch anchoring off. Your brain will grab the first number it sees no matter how many essays you read about it.
What you can do is get there first.
Before you walk into the shop, or the negotiation, or the car dealership, decide what the thing is worth to you. In your own units. Hours of your work. Weeks of groceries. A trip you’d rather take. Write the number down if you have to.
Then when their number arrives, it’s just information. It stops being an instruction.
And if you’re ever in a souk and the seller says 800, try saying 100 and watch his face. Nobody really knows what the bag is worth. That’s the whole game.
