Victory… Kinda.

I called Amjal Safi, the Enterprise Manager, back today. His response to my claim that there’s no “detailing fee” in the agreement was “It also doesn’t say you can take your dog in the car.”

Excuse me? Among some other things it doesn’t say I can do:

1. Eat food.
2. Sing along to the radio.
3. Sing along to the radio badly.
4. Breathe.

I wonder if Mr. Safi and his bosses would have charged me more if they realized I was doing those not-expressly-allowed activities in their rental as well.

Boring details of the exchange follow…

I realized quite quickly that logic was going to be lost on him, so I took a different tack. I basically said: look, you never told me I couldn’t have a dog in the car, if you had told me that, I wouldn’t have taken him — he then started telling me “we’re just charging you what it cost us”. I told him that I didn’t believe that, and that I’d like to see the invoice for it. I told him that if, in fact, the pet hair cost them $75, I’d pay the fee, but that I didn’t think it was right for them to mark-up the vacuuming by 500%.

He assured me that I could not find anyone in Bloomington to do the job for less than $75 or $100, and that if I could, he would charge me that. This was a tempting offer, but I knew two things would be the case. First, for a full car detail, he’s probably right. Second, if I got quotes for just cleaning out the back seat, he wouldn’t accept them… and then we’d be back to square one.

After a few more minutes of back-and-forth, he offered to drop it to $50, which was a mistake on his part. It demonstrated that he could, in fact, lower the price if he felt like it. I really should’ve taken advantage of this more than I did, but I basically told him that $50 was still ludicrous, but that if he dropped it to $40 I’d pay that just to get the matter settled. I should’ve said $25.

5 more minutes of arguing, which I think he was getting tired of (though I was really just getting started), and he said: “You know what? If that $10 is such a big deal to you, I’ll go ahead and knock that off as well. Would you be willing to accept $40?”

So… they probably still made $20 for cleaning out the dog hair, but the end result was acceptable. Lessons learned were these:

1. Be more aggressive.
2. Be a bigger pain in the ass.

I also noticed that there’s a lot that can be done with anger in a negotiation. Sometimes diffusing situations, sometimes escalating them, but always on one’s own terms. It’s a lot like ball control in a football game… if you can decide when to fast and when to go slow, the game is much easier for you. I notice that he almost always backed down when I started to act more irritated, owing (I’d guess) to the stark contrast between that and my demeanor for the rest of the call.