Haggling Abroad

I love travel. It's important to see different cultures and experience a place where the status quo is shifted a few degrees from what you're used to. But one thing that I've found I hate about travel is haggling for prices on goods. I get anxiety while trying to sort out if I'm getting a good deal or not, and that anxiety is exacerbated since my phone doesn't work on foreign networks so I can't hop online and see how much this particular good is selling for on any number of websites. So I get the merchant to drop his price a bit, but I wonder how much he'd inflated it for tourist prices in the first place. In these situations, you're forced to ask yourself: How much is this thing really worth to me? And perhaps that's the best way to find whether you're getting a good deal on anything you choose to purchase, but still, I always leave feeling like I could have gotten the merchant to go lower. It's always a losing proposition for me whenever I bargain.