Once mortified by her mother's haggling, Shoba Narayan finds that driving a hard bargain is as de rigueur in New York as in New Delhi

Middle age brings with it many challenges: a home, the pleasure and pain of furnishing one, and the sobering realization that you can actually learn something from your mother. For me, middle age was mostly about sticker shock—at the cost of the curtains, sofas, fabrics, and bric-a-brac that it takes to convert a classic six into a cozy home. When a year passed without my buying a single item of furniture, I called my mother in desperation.

"Mom," I said. "Teach me how to bargain."

"My baby," she cooed. "Welcome to the fold."

I have always been an awk.ward negotiator, even though I grew up in India among women who viewed the phrase fixed price with a flexibility that drove shopkeepers to tears. In spite of, or perhaps because of, watching them haggle down the price of everything from a Russian samovar to a Japanese teapot, I have been hard-pressed and altogether too proud (according to my mother) to do it myself.

Now, of course, there is little shame attached to bargaining. EBay and its innumerable sister sites have turned the Internet into a giant souk where gold Krugerrands, Iraqi bank notes

with Saddam Hussein's likeness, split-level homes, secondhand clothes, frequent-flier miles, beta-blockers, diet pills, used furniture, and useless collectibles are bartered, traded, and auctioned to the highest—or lowest—bidder. The so-called borderless economy in which a Danish collector can name his price for a dirndl skirt sold by a Tasmanian farmer has allowed Eastern practices such as haggling to seep into the Western psyche—so much so that the American Management Association now offers a seminar for purchasing managers on "bargaining tactics." It is only one short step to the day when Fortune 500 companies send their buyers to Egyptian bazaars to master the appropriate stance and body language.

Bargaining isn't hard to learn but comes easier to some than to others. Like flirtation, it is more attitude than technique, more style than skill. It requires aplomb, a certain je ne sais quoi that conceals how desperately you covet an object. Unlike negotiation, which is straightforward, dickering is roundabout, full of dips and detours—like calligraphy is to writing. You have to flatter and charm, tease and cajole. You have to talk in circles, skirt the issue of price, and not take yourself so seriously—all the qualities that had been drummed out of me by two decades of price-abiding life in the United States.

Americans are famously bad bargainers compared with, say, southern Europeans or Asians. They don't have the sense of entitlement of an Italian or the swagger of a Spaniard, both of whom can—without wincing—ask for something at a price that will put the merchant out of business. The Italians call bargaining mercanteggiare, which to me sounds like "egging the merchant to old age."