How Much is it Worth to You?

I recently spent a little over a week in Morocco, a country that I have wanted to visit since I was about ten. It was pretty much everything I had hoped for and anticipated, and of course a whole lot more, as one is never completely prepared for travel. We arrived in Marrakech midafternoon, and it was not nearly as hot as I had anticipated, only about 32 degrees celcius if that. Luckily the air was dry and our Riad was lovely. We had a memorable and refreshing first cup of scaldingly hot mint tea (which became an addiction), nibbled on almond cookies, and waited for the rest of our party to arrive from another part of the country. Once the whole gang was assembled and we were properly refreshed, we headed out to the infamous Marrakech Night Market held nightly in the Djemma El Fna, as it has for hundreds of years. It is one of the only world hertage sites to be purely an activity instead of a building. Nightly performances from storytellers, gypsies, roving henna artists, and monkey wranglers. It can be pretty overwhelming, especially for the stray American unaccustomed to barganing and defending your choices in dining and shopping. The food stalls are full of people with menus proclaiming to give you a life changing experience; when we finally just picked one there was applause for the salesman who finally got our group of five to take a seat.

Marrakech Night Market

The rule of life here is bargaining. Nothing has a fixed price - it is all what it is worth to you the buyer. The seller will of course begin with some outrageous fee, expecting you to at the least halve the offer if not more, assuming that their take will be somewhere around 60% of the original asking price. Many a salesman will of course try to get as much for their wares as they can, but that is no different that fixed price places in the states who mark up their wares for a larger profit. At one point in the trip the shop keeper kept lower the price for me as I kept trying to leave the store, mainly because I didn't have any bills small enough to bargain with. I never want to bargain hard for something cheap, then hand over large bills expecting change. It just makes it all feel so trivial, especially when you factor in the exchange rate. (The dirham was 1/8 the worth of the US dollar at the time we were there.)  You can find real deals everywhere, but you can also see the human touch in everything. There is hand painting, carving, weaving, guilding, on everything. From stair risers to ceiling beams, there is nothing mass produced. Even the daily orange juice is fresh squeezed. We saw no McDonalds or Starbucks; the most commercialized products we saw were bottled water and yoghurt. Everything changed when we got back into Europe. It was sad to leave a place that puts such a high value on craftsmen and individual attention to detail instead of cheaply made, mass produced generic wares.

 Morocco felt like a very personal country, where everyone wants to hear your story, and if you by something all the better, but they at least want to talk with you. They really see the human as an individual of worth instead of just another customer - which is not necessarily what you would expect entering in to a bargaining culture. The offer of a cup of tea is not a scam to get you to buy more. They have been operating in the arena of cross cultural communication for centuries, and its high time we in the west trust a little in the decency of human beings. Everywhere we went shopkeepers proudly discussed the great things Morocco has to offer, lamenting the lack of tourism and the brain drain they have for the upper crust of educated society. You get the sense that this is a country of people with lots to offer but still trying to find ways to market it to an arab afraid western world. So in the end, how much is that rug, or platter, or scarf really worth? Worth the hassel of bargaining to get a fair price, knowing that your piece is very likely the only one exactly like it, or worth the convience of not bargaining to get a mass produced clone? How much is the livelihood of a master artesan worth? Or the continuation of centuries of tradition?