Anyone get upset sometimes when clients request a discount? It usually doesn’t bother me but in my specific business (Airport shuttle in Punta Cana) it sometimes bothers me when I think about how clients spend thousands upon thousands of USD on hotel + flight and then want a 5 USD discount on their private airport pick up or prefer to go with someone else just because the service is 5 USD cheaper.
Not a big worry, just my rant for the day.
I tell people straight up; nobody will do as good of a job for cheaper. You want inferiority, knock your self out. You should be lucky I’m not charging more.
Airport shuttle in Punta Cana
My 10c on this, it’s entirely because tourists have been trained on advice to “always haggle” when travelling abroad in lower income countries. A lot of developing/low income countries are full of opportunists who go out of their way to charge tourists 3-5X more than the “true” price simply because they know they’re tourists. So it trains “saavy” tourists to haggle when they know that they’re travelling in a country that has a vastly different income gap.
It’s all a bit silly because yes, ultimately even if the tourist is getting the tourist price… we’re talking paying +$5-10 at most for something that is still much cheaper than what the same service/product would cost in their home country. And not everyone does this kind of bullshit tourist pricing (you clearly don’t), so at most their haggling saves them hardly anything on their budget.
Just wanted to illustrate why you might be running into this a lot. People do ask for discounts here or there with our business but it’s very much once in a blue moon from people who are clearly cheapskate assholes. For you, it’s very likely they’re perfectly fine people who’ve been conditioned to haggle by advice from others or from other experiences travelling to lower income countries.
It used to annoy me. It used to upset me. Not anymore.
Now I either do give a discount and move on or simply say no. Sometimes I’ll also give an explanation and other times it’s just a polite yet firm ‘no’.
As with almost everything else, it’s discretion and situational.
I sell 20 graphic t shirts as a side hustle. When people ask me for a discount I literally take the shirts out of their hands and tell them to kick rocks. It is 100% disrespectful. The ONLY reason they are doing it is because they know you are a tiny company and they think they can bully you. No, GTFO I dont want your business.