The price-performance ratio. A standard German compound with no clean English equivalent — value for money is close and carries a different logic, because it asks what you got for what you paid rather than whether the two correspond. The German word treats price and performance as two quantities in a defined relationship. A good ratio can be expensive.
The list price
Der Listenpreis. German suppliers publish price lists, and the list price is the price. Deviating from it requires a reason that can be stated: quantity, contract term, a documented specification change. The list is not an opening position. It is the answer to the question.
The free gift ordinance
Die Zugabeverordnung. The companion law, from 1932, limited free gifts with a purchase. The example used at the time: to stop people buying a bicycle because it came with a kilo of coffee. Repealed on the same day as the Rabattgesetz, and for the same reason — the EU e-commerce directive made it untenable.
The discount law
Das Rabattgesetz. From 1 January 1934 until 25 July 2001, German law restricted the discounts a retailer could give a consumer. Section 2 capped the cash discount at 3 percent of the price.
Germany was the only country in the European Union with a general prohibition on discounts — the government’s own bill said so when proposing repeal. The stated purpose was to stop customers being tempted too strongly by the size of a reduction.
A seventy-year-old law existed on the premise that a price is a fact, and that moving it around is a trick played on the buyer.
Honesty lasts longest
Honesty lasts longest. A German proverb, and the argument in it is about duration rather than virtue. It does not say honesty is right. It says honesty is what survives — which is the same argument the culture makes about agreements, prices and partnerships.
The jug and the well
The jug goes to the well until it breaks. A German proverb about repeated advantage-taking. The jug does not break because of any single trip. It breaks because the trips continued past the point where they should have stopped, and nobody was counting.
Trade and change
Trade and change — a fixed German pairing for commercial life as a whole, in use since the Middle Ages. The rhyme yokes commerce to movement and mutual dealing. It describes trade as something that circulates between people rather than as something extracted by one from another.
It has to add up for both
A deal has to work out for both sides. Said flatly in German business, as a statement of how transactions function rather than as an appeal to decency. Rechnen is the verb for calculating. The claim is arithmetical: a bargain that does not add up for one party will not hold.
Right and fair
Right and fair. A fixed German pairing, and billig here is not the modern word for cheap. It is the older sense: equitable, proportionate, what is due. The drift of billig from fair to cheap is one of the more telling movements in the German language, and the old meaning survives only in this phrase and in the law.
To over-advantage
To over-advantage. A single German verb for taking more than your due from a transaction. It sits in ordinary speech and in legal drafting alike. There is no neutral English verb for it — to get a better deal carries no fault, and übervorteilen carries nothing else.