Buying a house. Closing on a real fixer - the foundation and structure are solid, but it needs a new roof, electrical system and wiring, plumbing, sewer line, furnace, water heater, and to be honest walls. Nothing that professionals don’t do every day though, and for total cost of ownership I’ll get better value than I would buying fresh, with chances to get everything set to my specific taste.

Anyway that’s got me reminded how curious it is that while most American consumer transactions are conducted on a fixed-price basis, the largest ones - homes and personal vehicles - still involve haggling. There’s bids exchanged and even after you agree on a price there’s chances to change it through extras and inspections and repair negotiations.

But we haggle like that nowhere else in life, in fact it’s considered a little strange and even barbaric to do.

I started being like “even black market drug deals, it’s considered kinda uncouth to haggle”, then I noticed another difference: in that field, bulk pricing - the per-unit price decreases as number purchased grows - is expected as standard. To sell someone half an ounce of marijuana at the price of four eighths would be borderline obnoxious.

But over in white-market equivalents - buying 4 hammers from a family-owned hardware shop, or a 4 popsicles from an ice cream truck, you’d expect the total to come back as 4 times list price, and it would be a bit forward to even ask for a discount.

(Maybe has to do with how the drug economy end-user sales and purchase for resale blend together at the margins)

Then there’s what you see out in the sticks, where a lot of significant purchases are conducted by barter, with trucks and motorsports “toys” as large bills, guns and power tools as small bills, and ammunition as change.

(Remember that while the tax that provoked the Whiskey Rebellion was seen in urban areas as a sin tax, in cash-short rural areas where liquor was a medium of exchange, it was a severe disruption to the economy. Keep that in mind when you hear about proposals to regulate gun transfers between private owners.)

What else.. oh, eBay. Is that still that much of a thing? I remember when it was the biggest thing on the Internet. But it’s got its own norms and procedures.

In conclusion, we’ve got a lot of distinct cultures of commercial transaction in this country, but we code-switch between them pretty smoothly without noticing.