Shop around. Get three quotes. Don’t take the first offer. Let them compete for your business. Standard American advice, given to consumers and to procurement departments alike, and all of it assumes the number will move.
Consumer advice
American consumer journalism publishes guidance on how to haggle — what to say at a dealership, when to buy, what the dealer paid, what margin to aim for. The information asymmetry is treated as a problem to be solved rather than as the way things are.
Closing techniques
American sales training names and teaches them: the assumptive close, the alternative close, the urgency close, the takeaway. That the techniques have names means they are taught, practised and expected on both sides of the table.
The rent concession
American landlords offer a month free, a waived fee, a parking space, rather than reduce the headline rent. The price stays and the value moves. Both sides know what has happened.
Garage sales and flea markets
An ordinary American weekend activity in which private individuals sell household goods and every price is understood to be open. Children learn price negotiation there before they learn it anywhere else.
BATNA
Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. An acronym from Getting to Yes that entered general American business speech. Its function is to convert your willingness to walk away into a calculable quantity, so that the price conversation has a floor you can name to yourself.
Anchoring
The American negotiation vocabulary has a name for the effect of the first number, and it is taught as something to deploy rather than merely to notice. Who anchors first is a live question in American negotiation training, with an argument on each side.
Everything’s negotiable
Said flatly in American business, and meant broadly — price, terms, timing, scope, the contract itself. It is not advice about how to behave. It is offered as a description of how things are.
The retention department
American cable, telephone and internet providers maintain departments whose function is to offer a better price to a customer threatening to leave. The published rate and the rate available to somebody who asks are different rates, and the difference is staffed.
Medical bill negotiation
Americans negotiate hospital bills, and there is a substantial advice literature and an industry of patient advocates who do it professionally. A bill for medical care already received is treated as a starting figure.