Shopping in Morocco a memorable experience

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/01/2014 (4379 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Scott needed the hat, desperately. “Desperately” was our first mistake.

We’d been wandering, lost, in the souks of Marrakesh for more than two hours, every wrong turn leading to another. Despite dutiful sunscreen use, Scott was getting burned. We spotted an acceptable-looking straw fedora, stepped into the shade of a shop and began to haggle.

“How much?” Scott asked the shopkeeper in French.

“Three thousand dirham,” the shopkeeper replied — the equivalent of about $360.

Even though he knew that it was all part of the game, Scott flinched. As we’d rehearsed, I began to point wordlessly at all the hat’s flaws — spots where the brim seemed uneven, or where a straw poked loose — while he and the shopkeeper went back and forth: 100 dirham, 1,000 dirham, 120, 500. Finally, they shook hands on 160 dirham, about $20.

It was our first time haggling for anything, and we walked out of the souk feeling pretty proud of ourselves. Scott had talked the guy down by 2,840 dirham, after all.

It was a few more minutes before we realized that we were idiots. That $20 hat was definitely worth no more than $10. It didn’t appear to be handmade. And yeah, the brim was a bit uneven.

We spent the rest of the day trying to rationalize our poor mental math by talking ourselves into the purchase, as anyone with buyer’s remorse would.

Before I tagged along with Scott, my fiance, on a business trip to Paris during which we skipped south for five days of vacation in Morocco, we’d spent time planning our itinerary and dutifully educating ourselves on the customs of the country’s markets — especially the Jemaa El-Fna, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the commercial center of Marrakesh’s old city. We knew that we’d have to haggle for everything and that, if we did it well, we had a chance of getting incredible bargains on beautiful decor for our new apartment.

One of Scott’s Moroccan-born friends laid it out for us over dinner in Paris, explaining the four prices you can pay in the Marrakesh souks: One price for American tourists, a slightly lower price for French tourists, a third lower price for Parisian Moroccans like our friends, and finally the lowest price, for locals.

We knew that the latter two weren’t possible for us. But because Scott is fluent in French and knows a little Arabic, we thought that we could try for the second price — as long as I kept my mouth shut, since I don’t speak either language.

After our failure with the hat — and a few unpleasant encounters with overly aggressive vendors in the souks — we needed to regroup. The manager of our riad told us about a fixed-price market near the Saadian Tombs that offered a stress-free shopping experience for wimps like us.

A sweaty stroll took us past La Koutoubia and the ancient city gates to the market, which was stacked high with all the same goods you find in the souks — perfumes, carpets, tea services, lanterns and little souvenirs. At a shop with all the ambiance of a Kmart, the staff were the exact opposite of what you’d find in the souks, making themselves scarce behind the fluorescent-lit stacks of rugs or piles of scarves. Smaller, touristy items were on the first floor, while nicer goods were upstairs.

And though it was certainly not the shopping experience one comes to Morocco for, it was great for intel-gathering. We picked out a $75 rug that came with a tag explaining its handmade-in-Morocco provenance, something we couldn’t be sure we were getting in the souks. We bought a few sets of qarkabeb, or Moroccan castanets, for our nieces and nephews, since they cost only about $2 each and it didn’t seem worth the effort to haggle over something so small at the souks.

And then we laid the foundation for all our future transactions by walking around the store, noting the prices for everything else there that we might want, to use as a base-line for later negotiations. Hand-painted pottery and decorative tagines, for example, were incredibly cheap — about $6 for a vase or $4 for a small serving platter.

Armed with this new information, we set off for Essaouira, a beach town three hours away by bus. It might have been the cool sea breezes or the laid-back vibe of the windsurfer-filled city, but shopping was easier in Essaouira. So, when we encountered a vendor with a spread of teapots and platters, we put up our haggling dukes. Figuring that Scott’s language skills weren’t helping us get low prices, we employed a new strategy: accept a higher price only if the vendor would throw in a second item.

And that’s how we walked away with an ornate teapot and a sugar pot thrown in to sweeten the deal — though we later realized that in our enthusiasm, we’d overlooked its bent leg. But it was all for the equivalent of about $25 and, bolstered by our victory, we moved on to pottery.

A large black-and-white bowl, hand-painted in Fez with the lettering of an Arabic poem about honeybees and the sweetness of life, was our next buy, and for $20 we got the seller to throw in a decorative jar with the same pattern, as well as a hand-painted tile.

Still, after five days of shopping in Morocco, we realized that there’s no such thing as a fair price. Maybe it’s just our psychological susceptibility to what’s called choice-supportive bias, where you attribute positive qualities to a purchase to justify the money you spent, as I did with Scott’s hat. Or maybe it’s just pride.

But when we look at our souvenirs and they bring us right back to our memories — of the scrubdown we got in the hammam, of galloping down the beach on a camel, of fragrant tagine dinners on rooftops as we listened to the call to prayer — we know that the price was right.

— The Washington Post