Pawn Stars Knowing Your Customers Essay

1. Know your customers. When Pawn Stars: The Game launched, the customers were only different in a visual sense. In the latest update, some customer types are easier to haggle with, Marsh says. “The old man is more hard-nosed in his negotiating sense,” he says, so don’t try to push the crotchety old coot too low. Meanwhile, the hippie lady will be much more receptive to your lowball offers.
Random tweaks to each character’s personalities mean no two deals will go down identically. “Each instance of a customer going into your store has a different set of six variables based on the template for that character,” says Marsh. “All old men are not created the same.”
2. Know your history. “Think about things realistically,” says Marsh. “These are the actual values of the items in real life.” Many of the items were featured on the show, from a United States flag carried aboard Apollo 16 to a wooden, pull-string duck toy. Get the retail prices down and you’ll recognize good deals.
3. Haggle with finesse. The current haggling mechanic, which like everything in a Facebook game is subject to change at any moment, is “sort-of based on a fighting game,” Marsh says. Customers have a “patience bar,” and every time you make an offer they lose some patience. They storm out of your store when they’re fed up. If you make too low an offer, they might shut down, and you’ll have no way to get the item (unless you give them Candy, which costs Facebook Credits, which cost real-life dollars that you could be spending on actual collectibles).
“If you’re savvy, you can try to work them down over time,” Marsh says. Make offers that are low enough to get them to come down on their price, but not so low that they end negotiations.
That said, “Never be afraid to bid really low in order to gauge where people are willing to go,” says the game’s producer, Aaron Krasnov. If a customer has a lot of patience, you might hazard an offer of $0 to get them to drop their asking price by a lot.
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