Haggling at the Art Walk

Apologies in advance for the UFO like artifacts on this photo. On Tuesday and Thursday nights in San Jose del Cabo, they host the art walk in the town square. This is a pretty cool event, with artists coming out and promoting their work along a central walkway where they also offer wine and live music.

When we went, I think we must have missed both the live music and the wine, as we did not see either. It was also a particularly windy and slightly chilly night. My wife chose to snuggle in the comforts of the hotel bed and make good use of alone time while the rest of us poked around.

We started in this square, which you'll see has a a churro stall (that deserves its own post), a few stalls for selling art and jewelry, and at the very right of the picture you'll see what appears to be a statue but is a person pretending to be a statue. Yup. You know it's a tourist trap when you see one of those.

There's some interesting trinkets being offered. One is lanyard bead decorated art, where they place little colored beads one at a time to form a beautiful pattern along a wooden skeleton. Turtles, skulls, and other fun colorful trinkets. You can see a few examples by googling "huichol bead art" and you will get the idea.

There was another stall that featured jewelry made from scrap parts from a junkyard, and I was impressed with just how creative and beautiful the results were. Unfortunately I did not have pictures from that, and I wasn't sure if it was appropriate since some sellers do not like photo takers. But for example, they took the copper out of electrical wires to weave into a lattice.

In the end, one of the pieces of jewelry in one of the stalls caught my eye.

I knew this would be of interest to my wife, who really likes symbols in Buddhism such as the flower of life in the center of this piece of jewelry. So I immediately took a photo and asked if I should buy it. The offer from the seller was 450 pesos (around 23 USD). She confirmed that she wanted it, though she told me to haggle. I'm pretty terrible at haggling, and if she was there I'm sure she would have loved to do it. She's quite good at it too! I've watched her get a reading on the type of person the seller is and adapt her strategy to it.

But anyway, this time it was just me. I asked "Can you do 350?". Boring old me. Just going the 20% cut, and then meeting in the middle. And that's what happened. The response: "No. I'll do 400 though". And that was that. Later my wife said "Good job, for someone of your ability". Ah well, praise is praise, I'll take it. Good to try something I'm not comfortable with in general. And she was happy I got her something too.

Later I would hear that in some places you can really get crazy haggling deals. I don't think this art walk was the place for that, it's basically certain that all prospective buyers would be mostly American tourists with fatter wallets. Need to go farther out, and possibly for trinkets that are actually worth less.

So yeah, that was the highlight of the night, and I'm glad I can pick out something that my wife likes too. Anyone got good haggling techniques they would like to share?

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