Horseless Horses: Car Dealing and the Survival of Retail Bargaining

News reports suggest that in the near future, electronic chips on every item in a store will allow consumers to be charged for purchases automatically by simply walking out through the door.1 No checkout clerks will ask the shoppers if they found everything they were looking for; no checkout robots will ask if the customers would prefer to hear their oddly inflected voices speak in English or Spanish; nothing tangible will mark the exchange of value. This invisible transaction will be the latest evolutionary step away from the complex face-to-face negotiation between buyer and seller that once marked almost every retail transaction, one that uniquely survives in the purchase of an automobile. Would-be buyers who walk into automobile dealerships in the 21st century enter a time warp. They are transported back to the early 19th century , to an era before goods were sold to all shoppers at the same posted price and before dissatisfied customers could return their purchases. They are confronted by sales personnel who are masters of the ancient arts of flattery, high pressure, misdirection, misrepresentation, and patience. They are willing to sit for hours haggling over the cost of everything from the basic car itself, to the moonroof, the floor mats, the interest rate on the car loan, and the trade-in value of the owner’s current vehicle—to name just a few of the price points open to negotiation. It makes no difference if the customer is interested in a new or a used car; the process is roughly the same. In the worst (and fairly common) case, the shopper is met at the curb by a “greeter” who tries to determine if he or she is a “looker” or a serious buyer. Buyers are then turned over to a more experienced salesman who finds a car the buyer wants and opens a period of painful and protracted price negotiation, retreating often to an office in the back to check offers and counteroffers with his manager. Eventually the sales manager himself will appear to continue the dickering over price, and, if the customer is unyielding, the sales manager is sometimes replaced by his manager. In the meantime, the buyer has had to work with the dealer’s used-car appraiser to determine the trade-in value of his or her current car. Once the price of the new and used cars are agreed to, the customer is turned over one more time to the business manager who not only negotiates finance and insurance charges, but also tries to sell dealer-installed add-ons such as fabric protection and rust proofing.2 As bad as this system may seem, historically things were even worse. Prior to 1958, the buyer often had no idea what the dealer\u27s standard asking price was, because there was no established way to represent the price of cars on the lot. The requirement that all new cars carry a sticker listing the manufacturer\u27s suggested retail price (MSRP) created a common starting point for price negotiations, but no more than that. The advent of the Internet has armed some buyers with more accurate information about dealer costs, but that has only made the negotiations fiercer, forcing dealers to give better prices to informed buyers and then trying to make up the loss of profit by keeping up the costs to others. With the isolated exception of General Motors Saturn division, dealers adjust the prices of their vehicles to the local market, charging additional markup on highly sought after cars and cutting the price of slow-selling ones. And even on a Saturn lot, where sticker prices are stuck to, negotiation can take place on ancillary products and services, and will always occur on the trade-in allowance for the customer\u27s current car

Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity

In the 1860s when Harriet Robinson annually set aside a full month for the spring cleaning of her Malden, Massachusetts home, she had the occasional assistance of hired help, but none from her husband William. Over the years, as the Robinsons improved their house by installing weather stripping, repapering rooms, refinishing furniture, and putting in a new mantle, Harriet\u27s biographer Claudia Bushman notes that neither she nor William lifted a finger toward household maintenance. 1 Some eighty years later, immediately after World War II, when Eve and Sam Goldenberg moved into a somewhat decrepit apartment in the Bronx, Sam patched the holes in the wall himself and they both worked to scrub away the residual odor of people who don\u27t care. 2 After a few years in the Bronx, the Goldenbergs (now the Gordons) moved out to a new subdivision on Long Island where Sam built a brick patio and the surrounding fence, installed a new front door, and drew up plans to build a dormer window on the front facade. Real estate agents for the development would drive prospective buyers to the Gordons\u27 house so they could admire Sam\u27s handiwork and, in the words of the family chronicler Donald Katz, see what a homeowner could do with old-fashioned, all American know-how ... through the agency of his own hands.

Children’s Schooling and Parents’ Investment in Children: Evidence from the Head Start Impact Study

Parents may have important effects on their children, but little work in economics explores whether children's schooling opportunities crowd out or encourage parents' investment in children. We analyze data from the Head Start Impact Study, which granted randomly-chosen preschool-aged children the opportunity to attend Head Start. We find that Head Start causes a substantial increase in parents' involvement with their children—such as time spent reading to children, math activities, or days spent with children by fathers who do not live with their children—both during and after the period when their children are potentially enrolled in Head Start. We discuss a variety of mechanisms that are consistent with our findings, including a simple model we present in which Head Start impacts parent involvement in part because parents perceive their involvement to be complementary with child schooling in the production of child qualities.

Prize Structure and Information in Tournaments: Experimental Evidence

This paper examines behavior in a tournament in which we vary the tournament prize structure and the information available about participants' skill at the task of solving mazes. The number of solved mazes is lowest when payments are independent of performance; higher when a single, large prize is given; and highest when multiple, differentiated prizes are given. This result is strongest when we inform participants about the number of mazes they and others solved in a pre-tournament round. Some participants reported that they solved more mazes than they actually solved, and this misreporting also peaked with multiple differentiated prizes.Tournaments; Wage Structure

Black Men and Businessmen: The Growing Awareness of a Social Responsibility

A study of changes in American business attitudes concerning the recruitment of blacks since World War II relates black employment problems to the businessman\u27s concept of his role in society.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1368/thumbnail.jp

Lang and Lee: Two Views of the Great Depression

During the 1930s, America was the subject of American art. The European expressionism that had influenced so many artists through the 1920s was unceremoniously abandoned in favor of domestic realism. Creative people in all the arts adopted the theme. Virgil Thomson\u27s music and Martha Graham\u27s dance joined the novels of John Dos Passos and the plays of Thornton Wilder in an across-the-board celebration of America, past and present. Domestic realism, as an artistic style, could take two distinct forms. · On the one hand there was the documentary style that sought to illustrate the country\u27s troubles as a first step toward solving them. On the other hand there was the American Scene, a somewhat amorphous concept that stressed the strength and traditions of the country in a consciously nationalistic way

Taxation and the Earnings of Husbands and Wives: Evidence From Sweden

I examine the response of husbands\u27 and wives\u27 earnings to a tax reform in which husbands\u27 and wives\u27 tax rates changed independently, allowing me to examine the effect of both spouses\u27 incentives on each spouse\u27s behavior. I analyze the large Swedish tax reform of 1990–1991 and find that in response to a compensated fall in one spouse\u27s tax rate, each spouse\u27s earnings rise. I compare these results to those of simplified econometric models used in the typical setting in which independent variation in each spouse\u27s tax rate is unavailable. I find that standard econometric specifications may produce substantially biased estimates

Horse Trading in the Age of Cars

The trading, selling, and buying of personal transport has changed little over the past one hundred years. Whether horse trading in the early twentieth century or car buying today, haggling over prices has been the common practice of buyers and sellers alike. Horse Trading in the Age of Cars offers a fascinating study of the process of buying an automobile in a historical and gendered context. Steven M. Gelber convincingly demonstrates that the combative and frequently dishonest culture of the showroom floor is a historical artifact whose origins lie in the history of horse trading. Bartering and bargaining were the norm in this predominantly male transaction, with both buyers and sellers staking their reputations and pride on their ability to negotiate the better deal. Gelber comments on this point-of-sale behavior and what it reveals about American men. Gelber's highly readable and lively prose makes clear how this unique economic ritual survived into the industrial twentieth century, in the process adding a colorful and interesting chapter to the history of the automobile

Changes in the Incidence and Duration of Periods Without Insurance

BACKGROUND: Policymakers have recently proposed ways of providing health care coverage for an increased number of uninsured persons. However, there are few data that show how the incidence and duration of periods in which persons do not have insurance have changed over time. METHODS: We used two data sets from the Survey of Income and Program Participation of the U.S. Census Bureau: one that covered the period from 1983 through 1986 (25,946 persons), and another that covered the period from 2001 through 2004 (40,282 persons). For each set of years, we estimated the probability that a person would be uninsured for some period of time and the probability that a person would subsequently obtain private or public insurance. We also estimated the probabilities that persons in various demographic groups would become uninsured over the course of a year and would remain uninsured for various amounts of time. RESULTS: The percentage of the population that lost insurance in a 12-month period increased from 19.8% in 1983-1986 to 21.8% in 2001-2004 (P=0.04). The percentage that was uninsured for a period of time increased markedly among persons with the lowest educational level and predominantly represented loss of private coverage. The percentage of new uninsured periods that ended within 24 months increased from 73.8% to 79.7% between the two study periods (P<0.001); increases were seen in all age groups and among persons of all educational levels. Transition from no insurance to private insurance decreased from 65.2% to 59.2% (P<0.001). Transition from no insurance to public insurance increased from 8.7% to 20.4% (P<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: As compared with the years from 1983 through 1986, from 2001 through 2004, more people, particularly those with the lowest educational level, had periods in which they were not insured. The periods without insurance were shorter in 2001-2004 than they were in 1983-1986, since an increase in transitions to public coverage offset a reduction in transitions to private coverage. Our results portend difficulties if private coverage continues to decline and is not offset by further expansions of public insurance.Economic