• This topic has 47 replies, 40 voices, and was last updated 10 years ago by LoCo.
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  • Your best ever barter
  • gears_suck
    Free Member

    Tell me about your bartering prowess. Will you negotiate a discount anywhere?

    grantmccall63
    Free Member

    I played a local taxi driver for 2 hours at chess in Bali about 25 years ago to settle a negotiation which saved me about 5p on the trip to the next resort. That was a satisfying win.

    bearnecessities
    Full Member

    When I was about 16 I swapped my very average cannondale m500, for a minter explosif pro with suntour xc pro groupset.

    Didn’t actually haggle much thinking about it, guy just really wanted a cannondale!

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    avdave2
    Full Member

    I swapped girlfriends with my best friend 20 years ago. We’ve been married 18 years with 3 kids now so I guess that was pretty successful.

    Drac
    Full Member

    I convinced two guards that the droids they were looking for weren’t the ones I had as passengers.

    Jamie
    Free Member

    The greatest trick I ever pulled, was convincing the world I didn’t exist.

    mattsccm
    Free Member

    Swapped 2 dead squirrels for a pound of mature Cheddar.

    gears_suck
    Free Member

    Jamie – Member
    The greatest trick I ever pulled, was convincing the world I didn’t exist.

    Not so much a negotiation Jamie.

    mattsccm – Member
    Swapped 2 dead squirrels for a pound of mature Cheddar.

    Pretty much the same thing. You gained nothing. Disqualified!

    jools182
    Free Member

    Swapped my Gt timberline for a graham weigh vitus

    It was supposed to be a short term swap

    Gt got nicked from my mates garage, I ended up with the vitus

    Jamie
    Free Member

    Not so much a negotiation Jamie.

    I dunno. I had to barter the world down from just thinking I didn’t exist at weekends.

    willard
    Full Member

    Managed to convince a chap to swap his six month old Silver Pigeon 5 for my year old Urika 2. Best swap of my life that.

    Flaperon
    Full Member

    When my local Comet was closing down I negotiated £350 off the price of a bean-to-cup coffee machine, snapping it up for £225. Still feel guilty.

    dannybgoode
    Full Member

    There was a club night on in Birmingham and a few of us were going down from Sheffield on a coach organised by the club promoter.

    Got to the pick up point and there were 5 people for a 55 seater coach. Coach driver plumb refused to take us.

    I got on the phone to the promoter (who I didn’t know at all – just happened one of the DJ’s who was due to play was with us) and managed to convince him (mainly because said DJ was with us and he somewhat needed him there) to a) pay for a taxi from Sheffield to Birmingham, b) let us all in for free and c) give us £90 toward our taxi fare back to Sheffield afterward.

    Cheers

    Danny B

    gears_suck
    Free Member

    Managed to negotiate nearly £80 off the asking price of a gas analyser in Crack Converters. Got it for £150. I needed to test the amount of CO in my guffs. Turns out there isn’t any. Nearly all methane and some added flavours. So, sold it on fleabay for £250.
    I was pleased with myself that day.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Eggs, milk and flour to the same ratio by volume, and a pinch of salt and pepper.

    beaker2135
    Full Member

    that’s batter, but it’s near enough

    Cougar
    Full Member

    Sheriff Fatman.

    JEngledow
    Free Member

    Managed to convince a chap to swap his six month old Silver Pigeon 5 for my year old Urika 2.

    Any deal that involves getting rid of a semi-auto is a good one in my book!!

    _tom_
    Free Member

    Unfortunately the only one that springs to mind is drunkenly haggling a taxi driver down to a lift home for a fiver, it normally costs about £20 on a Saturday night.

    Flaperon
    Full Member

    needed to test the amount of CO in my guffs

    PhD thesis?

    CaptainFlashheart
    Free Member

    Offered ten percent off an inner tube. Got three Quiksilver rashies in exchange.

    Nice.

    alpinegirl
    Free Member

    On the taxi driver theme… once I lost my wallet on a night out and managed to get taken home for free in exchange for the cake I’d baked that day.

    Best barter (in my mind) was on a recent expedition – where I was constantly hungry – I would take other leaders cups of tea to their tents in the mornings and get their chocolate bars.

    LoCo
    Free Member

    Forks for television,

    forks for loads of wood work round the house,

    Trousers for a massive carpet in Morroco,

    Shock service for a case of very nice red wine.

    IA
    Full Member

    Checkup at the dentist (private, quite pricey) for some advice/troubleshooting his KVM switch.

    DezB
    Free Member

    Trousers for a massive carpet in Morroco

    My favourite sentence of the day

    vim_fuego
    Free Member

    Haggle at every opportunity.
    Haggled a 50% reduction on 2nd of two fillings at dentist.

    freeagent
    Free Member

    Trousers for a massive carpet in Morroco

    My favourite sentence of the day

    +1

    jivehoneyjive
    Free Member

    I have a few good uns, but one that really stands out is not exactly a standard barter…

    I worked for an events company in Sydney for the big day out (a festival), setting up the fencing and suchlike… was good craic, but they then decided they didn’t need us any more in the middle of the night (the festival was in the Olympic park some way out of town) so the owners wife counted 20 of us to be taken to the site office for our details to be taken and our pay cut according to the hours we had not worked… I was at the back of the queue and snuck off into the shadows, finding the empty backstage lounge and mucking around in there for a bit.

    A few weeks later, there was another festival, so I went to the backstage entrance and said I was there for the lighting… the security went and checked and said my shift wasn’t due for another hour~ in the meantime, I had clocked the wristbands everyone was wearing to get in, which were purple.

    I then went to a craft shop in town and bought some card of a similar shade and some labels and with some scissors and a small amount of cunning and artistry, doctored some homemade wristbands, with some pretty basic scribbling to mimic the writing on the band I had left over from the previous festival, then phoned up a few mates.

    We went in through the main entrance and no-one blinked an eye.

    I’m having a proper giggle writing this, because I’d forgotten all about it and it was pretty frickin satisfying 😆

    richmtb
    Full Member

    Many years ago I worked in a hi-fi shop.

    One day the receivers turned up to close the shop as the owner had neglected to pay any suppliers for quite some time.

    As we were being told to leave I asked what about the amp I was going to buy and pointed to a top end Yamaha home cinema amp worth about £1300.

    Receiver asked me how much it was and quick as a flash I said £150.
    Paid them £150 got a had written receipt and left the shop with the amp under my arm (well both arms it was bloody heavy!)

    BigButSlimmerBloke
    Free Member

    I spent a few days in luxor, and every day traveled from the hotel on the west bank to the temples on the east bank. Every day I went to the ferry and assked how much.
    £5.
    that’s a bit much how about £1?
    And every day we settled for £2-£3

    Until the last day, when I noticed there was a price list. Tourist price? .75c – awesome bartering ability by me

    marcus7
    Free Member

    24 fosters beer towels for 10 cases of beer, corfu, 1989….. good night had by all…

    midlifecrashes
    Full Member

    Traded my clothes my boots and my motorcycle, for my life…

    Also a cheapo HPDeskjet 550C for a posh LaserJet4M that lasted me 15 years after the swap.

    Clong
    Free Member

    Got stopped in Tanzania for “speeding” in a 30 year old Unimog, for which there was an on the spot fine. Managed to haggle it down it to a bottle of orange fanta.

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    Similar to some above.

    A tray of Danish pastries for a taxi ride home.

    £50 to DJ for 3 hours (I can’t mix).

    Run an event in return for a bar tab (£1200 bar tab racked up in 3 days, it’s quite stressfull manageing 2000 people at 3am whilst battered).

    I think there was still an outstanding bill for about £2k with Teralek, can’t remember how we got out of that one.

    avdave2
    Full Member

    richmtb the question was what have you bartered for, not what goods have you obtained by deception. 🙂

    clubber
    Free Member

    Not me but when I lived in Nigeria, a friend of mine’s Dad got stopped by the police for ‘speeding’ – this translates as ‘we want some cash’.

    He wasn’t speeding so refused to pay. They threatened to take him to the police station. He insisted, so did they. Eventually, he offered to drive them round to his house and give them a beer which they accepted. I was there when my mate’s Dad and three traffic police walked in and proceeded to have beers at his bar, all very civilized.

    tomhoward
    Full Member

    A McD’s cheese burger for a Saracen frame (BSO era)

    I played with it for a while, with a pedal spanner. Then a vice. Great fun!

    trail_rat
    Free Member

    Work gloves for water on an offshore rig with no drinking water – only 1 cup of brown “fermented bread water” with each meal……..

    In the black sea off simpheropol ukraine – avoid there if your offered a job 😉

    tinsy
    Free Member

    I swapped my 3.0 Ghia Capri for an MK1 Golf GTI, back when neither were worth anything. I learnt early on that all the VW reliability stuff was rubbish. Fast little thing though.

    konabunny
    Free Member

    T-R: I love kvas! Suppose having neither a break from it nor enough of it would be a drag tho…

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