HIGH PRESSURE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 90, 16 April 1940, Page 5

HIGH PRESSURE.

EGYPT'S "SALESMEN." NEW ZEALANDERS LEARN. LESSONS IN BARGAINING. (By Air Mail—Special to "Star.") With the N.Z.E-F. in Egypt, March 28. The streets of this Egypt which we of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force are coming to know are a happy hunting ground for high pressure salesmen. We might have known what to expe?t even before we landed at Suez, when the first words of a line of sales talk that has not yet abated were shouted up to us from the bobbing "bumboats" which swarmed around our transport:

"Turkish Deligh'! Very nice, very , cheap! Good for the belly!" ' That was only the start of it. Ever * since then, from the mouths of infants J and old men and all the stages of life inl between, an incessant, persistent plea for! patronage has echoed in our ears, asking!, sometimes a little money for nothing,'; more often a lot of money for almost |. nothing. _ t! "Give it one cigarette!" and '"Give it ' half piastre!" "with the symbolical accompaniment of an outstretched hand, 1 are the catch phrases of the elementary stage of Egyptian street salesmanship. In the poorer quarters we hear these cries at every step. But let us advance to the more professional and highly skilled type, in which something—tangible or otherwise —is offered for sale. It may be a "shoe shine," a necklace, the reading of a fortune, a conducted tour -of the mosques. Whatever it is it will have one thing in common with every other offer, in that its original price will be some 200 per cent higher than you, if you have had the experience of only an hour :n Egypt, will ultimately pay. Next Move is Yours. This is the basis of street salesmanship of the Egyptian kind. The vendor deliberately asks a price which he doesn 11 greatly expect to receive, and the next

move is with you. If you are not interested you walk on, tight-lipped and ignoring, and after dogging your 6teps for a while he will ring up "No sale" on his mental cash register. On the other hand, if your curiosity is aroused, this is the moment to start bargaining. It's now your turn to make an offer that you do not greatly expect to be accepted. You err on the low side and stick to your price, enjoying the free entertainment of watching him bring his down in gradual stages.

In the end you may have to raise your offer slightly to meet his, but quite often he will come down all the way. And that can be a little embarrassing. II remember one fellow offering me a necklace for 40 piastres; I had no desire to buy it, and I thought a counter-offer of five would put him off. Imagine my surprise when he accepted! But I just didn't have the five piastres, and I had to walk away with the thought that New Zealand had probably lost caste a little in that encounter.

Naturally, the Egyptians and the New Zealanders have come to know one another pretty well by now, and some prices are more or less standardised 'by mutual, unspoken consent. For instance, the imperturbable little Cairo bootblacks who crouch on their heels in front of you every few yards know that a shoe Shine rates only half a piastre —a little more than a penny. The shine he gives your boots is worth it, too,

Yet in this land of many surprises we may even be wrong about that. I have in mind the case of the gharries—leather 1 upholstered "two-in-hands" that ply for hire in t'he streets. To us they are a delightful and favourite means of travel, and it seems that our coming has saved them from extinction, for the much speedier motor cabs "had captured much of their business. But just as we thought ■we had the fixing of prices down to a fine art (a shilling or so an hour doesn't seem so bad), a newspaper mentioned that our generosity with the gharry drivers was such that Egyptians were complaining they could no longer enjoy cheap fares! Art Of Persistence. There is a smooth-tongued and wellinformed class of salesman known as a licensed dragoman, who also seeks our 1 favour from the city sidewalks. He , knows the number of stones in the Great

Pyramid, how many people visited the Mosque of the Sultan Hassan on NewYear's Day, tha life story of every animal in the Zoo—and he will guide you anywhere at a moment's notice. Certainly he is worth having if you are sight-seeing, but he cheerfully niakeg it hard for you to convince him that you have something else to do. He is a past master in the art of persistence. A tall, black-gowned member of his clan surprised me the other day, when, after exhausing his list of conducted tours, he confided impressively: "Of course, I am an Algerian, and I have the power to read your fortune. If you wish, I will recount your past and look into your future." There was versatility! The fortune telling sideline is an interesting one. Mention the matter of the price and you will be told that if yoii don't agree with the reading of your palm there will be no charge. I heard of a New Zealander who had his hand read by one seer, went to another for a "check-up,'' and then com,plained to them tooth about a 20 years' discrepancy in his predicted expectancy of life. They ! went into a huddle; the first emerged : for another look at the hand, saw his mistake, and reduced the discrepancy to , only one year.

Don't interpret this story of Egyptian salesmen as a cross-section of Cairo's commerce. For th«=e are only the business men of the streets, whose wares are not set in the flittering windows of the city's ultra-modern stores. But they are, too, the colourful, picturesque figures who help to make Egypt the fascinating country that it is.