Carlos has a souvenir stall at the resort. He almost never gets any customers even though you can hardly find a single tourist who isn’t interested in buying a Dominican souvenir.
The reason for Carlos’s lack of sales is the way he conducts business. Whenever a potential customer appears and starts to ask for the price of an item, Carlos refuses to name it. Instead, he places all of the items the customer seems to notice on a plate. When the plate begins to spill over with items, Carlos names an absolutely exorbitant price for them. If the customer is anything like me, she feels insulted and leaves. In most other cases, the customer imagines the length of time it would take to haggle the price down to something reasonable, feels bored, and leaves.
If Carlos put reasonable price tags on his souvenirs, he’d sell out his stock within hours. However, the painstaking hunt for a tiny margin of profit does not attract him. He prefers to spend his time hoping for a miracle. One day, he dreams, a tourist who’d be too drunk or too rich to care would stumble upon Carlos’s stall and buy an item for 20 times its worth.
I recognize this mentality only too well from my own culture. People spend years chasing after some ridiculous plans of rapid self -enrichment that never come to anything. In the meanwhile, they live in poverty. Try offering them a reasonable opportunity to make a small profit (and then a slightly bigger one and so on), and you will see the light go out of their eyes and boredom take place of enthusiasm.
“Why do you work so much for so little money? ” is the question my Ukrainian relatives and acquaintances ask me all the time.
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