The Fish Tank - A Repentant Agressive Negotiators Story

The Swordtails survived days, weeks and now months. This fact bolstered our confidence in our fishkeeping abilities and so we added to our aquatic menagerie. Of couse when we bought our first fish the salesman saw a couple of suckers and sold us on the fish of the month club card. So every month we went to get fish food we had to use our fish of the month card to get our moneys worth...right? It turns out that not only are Swordtails resilient to neglect but they are quite prolific breeders as well. In time our little 20 gallon tank was full of fish. Logically it was time to get a larger tank.

During this same period of time my work partner and I had started a small side business selling kits on eBay. The revenues from this micro business venture had reached a grand total of about $800.00 dollars. So it wasnt that we lacked capital to relieve our fish population of their overcrowded conditon. No, as it turns out greed colored our minds and helped us to reason that the tank wasn't that crowded yet. They can wait. Oh yes, we had become miserly in our micro enterprise. The pre Christmas Ghost visited Scrooge would have been proud of us and counted us as close comrades. How miserly we had become would soon be self evident.

In our business it is common practice to hire a Co-op for the summer. I don't typically like to because you have to take time to train them and by the time you get them trained they leave to go back to college. The summer of 2008 wasn't going to be any different. We hired a Co-op and as it turned out he was pretty good and didn't need much training. One of things that made this co-op shine was that he jumped right in and was completely on board with getting a new fish tank. He even volunteered to donate $20 dollars to the fish tank expansion venture. It looked like we landed a keeper.

Craigslist is great! You can find anything there and with the economy the way it is right now there are bargains to be had. In our search for a new fish tank we had looked a couple of weeks on Craigslist and hadn't really found anything that grabbed us. My wife also knew we were looking for a tank and she had also been on the hunt. One particular morning she called and let me know about a tank she had found. It sounded great so I immediately looked it up on Craigslist myself. Wow! It was everything we were looking for and all at a very enticing adverstised price of $120. My negotiation juices started flowing. I bet myself I could get all of that for $80 bucks. Before I knew it I had blurted out my boastful negotiation thought fantasy in front of my workmates. I really had no choice at that point. I called the number on the advertisement and set up a time to take a look at the tank. Game on.

One of my former employers had us take a negotiating class. It was a good class. It had a lot of sound principals for engaging someone in negotiations. However, not all situations where something is offered for sale require negotiations. You should really have a conscience before you are allowed to use any formalized negotiation tactics on someone else. There should be a test or something. It should go something like this "Well, we have the results, you did great on the negotiation skills test part but...it appears you don't have a conscience so...no negotiation license for you".

Its almost like karate or something. If the other person is oblivious to the tactics it can be like beating up a four year old and taking their halloween candy. The candy may taste good but the victory just isn't as satisfying somehow. So it was with the fish tank negotiations. As it turns out the fellow selling the tank was Asian. I had Asian friends and I had even lived in Asia for a short period of time so I had developed this stupid bigoted racial profile that sterotyped all Asians as master negotiators.

This was really just a set up. This guy knew he didn't want $120 bucks for all this stuff, that was his starting price. So, here we are in this guys apartment looking at this beautiful fish tank with these second generation Pearl Gourami's he had hand raised and I got my negotiation game face on. If I were to guess, there was at least $600 dollars worth of equipment, plants, and fish. I was a little puzzled. This seemed like too good of a deal. This guy had to be running some kind of fish fencing criminal sydicate or something.

Oh well, here goes, he's the one that set the asking price I reasoned. I started out by saying that "yeah were interested, but what is your bottom line price?". He didn't speak very good english and I could tell I put him on the spot. It turns out that he was leaving for Taiwan in two days and somebody else had already stopped and made an offer but didn't show back up. My negotiation killer instincts took over upon learning this news. Now I had a serious advantage. Time was on my side and I had walk away power. But, there was this faint voice calling from the cold dark miserly pit I had stuffed my concience into. I couldn't offer this guy eighty dollars for this stuff, that would pratically be a robbery. So instead of eighty dollars I generously offered him one hundred dollars.

He stammered and while he was stammering I verbally reaffirmed the hundred dollar price with my co-worker and the co-op I had brought along. I also wanted them there so they could witness my Jedi like negotiation skills "You will take a hundred dollars....I will take a hundred dollars",,,kinda like that. Well the guy selling the tank looked mortified. If I had to describe the look....it was like the Grinch on Christmas morning when he heard the Whos down in Whoville singing instead of crying..yeah exactly like that. Your right, I was fazed for a second but who wouldn't be. I could tell he was defeated and was willing to accept the hundred dollars in exchange for what he knew was a virtual treasure trove of fish, plants, and equipment.

So we worked out the logistics and as I was handing the guy the hundred dollars a miracle happened. The co-op we had hired decided that this guy deserved at least fifteen dollars more and volunteered the additional money. Now I felt stupid. I knew this was a great deal for $120 and I really wanted to show off my negotiation skills in front of my peers but here this co-op all of 24 years old and still fresh of conscience and he does the right thing. I could tell the guy selling the fish tank felt a whole lot better and his faith in humanity had been slightly restored. I on the other hand did not. Now it was my turn to sport the Grinch listening to whos in whoville look. Once we were back in the car I proceeded to berate the co-op all the way back to the office about how we could have gotten a better deal and he should have left well enough alone. But in my heart of hearts I knew he had done the right thing. Eventually, and in bits and pieces, I confessed my sins to my co-workers and complimented the co-op for doing the right thing (all backhanded compliments of course).

If I had to boil this story down to one moral it would be.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." - Jesus Christ