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Can you haggle/barter with the Apple store?

S

Sn0wball

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 30, 2009
126
0
England
When buying a Macbook Pro?

Other companies like Sony and Dell allow you to on their notebooks, when purchasing directly from them.

Do Apple, too?

MBP prices in this country (England) are very steep. $2850 USD (£1,850 GBP) for a middle 15" (2.66GHz with 9400M+9600M GT) with the standard low stock values of 4GB, 320GB @ 5400RPM, with anti-glare and 3yr Applecare.
 
You can try. I've heard stories that people have occasionally wrangled small discounts.

I have read about instances where, if you have an online account, and go through all the motions of putting a machine in the cart, but then not following through with the purchase, you might get a phone call from a sales rep asking to see why you didn't follow through, and offering you a small incentive to complete the purchase. However, this was years ago, and I don't know if it's still (ever?) done.

chrono1081 said:
Um neither does sony or dell. Haggling doesn't exist anymore especially with any big company.
Click to expand...

If you don't ask, you surely won't get anything. I've been able to haggle at Sony Stores simply by telling the salesman "I want to buy, but not at this price. What's the best you can do for me?" They'll pick up a calculator and give you a new price without batting an eye. Of course it depends on how "big ticket" and in-demand the item is.
 
chrono1081 said:
Um neither does sony or dell. Haggling doesn't exist anymore especially with any big company.
Click to expand...

For the majority of cases I'm in agreement with this.

I used to work for a big company, premium clothing store. Occasionally people tried to haggle, they were never successful.

I've heard the odd story of people getting a free case or something if a manager was in a good mood, but mainly, no. Buy refurb?

Or some places (Comet, John Lewis, sometimes PC World) will sell off old stock for a couple of hundred quid less after an update. I've seen Comet do this a lot actually.
 
My dad is a DEVIL for haggling prices, however even he couldn't get a discount from Apple. At most, as the poster above said, you could get some software thrown in, but you should be buying the TOP OF THE LINE product.
 
Ever haggled with a car dealer? Ok, so not exactly the same situation, but it's similar. You likely won't get a drop on the price of the product, but you can often get them to throw in some free/discounted accessories with the laptop.

Just make a bit of a stink about the laptop not having a VGA port and they may give you a free adapter. You could also try and persuade them to give you software.

This is coming from someone who has worked recently for a large computer company. They aren't likely to discount the main product, but accessories have a much larger profit margin so you can barter for those to be included with your purchase.
 
Getting a discount from a "big" company is harder to some extent, due to the fact that the sellers are mere pawns of the company. It is not up to them to sell more or less, and some shop assistants couldn't care less.

In little shops, where the boss is in charge of his own shop, and at the counter, it is generally much easier. They need the business.
 
I called apple to order a refurb a while ago and after letting the chick talk for like 5 mins i said well I'll get back to you and maybe call back and she panicked that the sale was lost. she gave me all her info and said she would expedite my shipping to next day if I called her back.
 
Small individual sales, not likely. Like someone said, most they would do is add software like iWork or something. Apple will only consider it if it's large purchases and you're shopping around at different retail sources but even that is not a guarantee.
 
chrono1081 said:
Um neither does sony or dell. Haggling doesn't exist anymore especially with any big company.
Click to expand...

Of course it does. You're talking out of your arse, lol.

Sony knocked off £70 when I ordered their new FW Vaio last year over the phone. Dell routinely knock money off their online prices if you call and ask them, often saving you £100, or upgrading components for free.

And this is calling them (Sony/Dell) direct. No middle man or retailer.

However Sony and Dell have (and are) competition - at the end of the day you can simply elect to get a PC notebook from another brand if they don't woo you enough - whereas Apple has its own platform and monopoly, so I suppose they charge as much as they can get away with. The all hefty Apple tax.
 
Yes, Apple uses deal closers. I worked for Apple Online. For an agent to be able to offer a deal closer you have to first commit to a purchase then threaten that you can get the same computer set up somewhere else. The agent (if they care enough not to lose the sale) can then go to the supervisor and ask for a deal closer code. However, in my experience the customer had to agree to buy AppleCare at the same time. And the discounts weren't good--maybe $50-100 or so depending on the model. And this was about a year ago.

Also if you threaten to return a product once you receive it, Apple CS can try to "save the sale" with various offers. They would rather the product not be returned even with you paying the restocking fee.

I worked as an Apple agent through Arise, and we had metrics on everything, and Arise could lose the contract at any time, so we worked under much greater pressure than traditional Apple employees, which is to say that the parts about having to add AppleCare may have been an Arise requirement (as adding AppleCare to a sale was highly desirable, and just selling a computer without "beyond the box" items wasn't well regarded).

Anyhow, the bartered deal you get won't be any greater than the EDU discount or business discount. And more people are eligible for those than you realize. You can check to see if a business has deals with apple by entering their name into this url: http://www.apple.com/eppstore/businessnamegoeshere

For example:
http://www.apple.com/eppstore/microsoft
http://www.apple.com/eppstore/google
http://www.apple.com/eppstore/adobe
;)
 
About a year ago (maybe even 2 yrs ago), I was in an Apple Store picking up stuff I didn't need...haha...and over heard a sales person telling a customer that he'd throw in a .Mac year membership if they bought the macbook.

They actually said they would discount the macbook and then add on the .Mac to cover the cost of it so it was free.

Maybe there was some kind of special going on at the time. I've never tried to haggle with them cause I always assumed it was something they just didn't do in the stores.
 
Yes you can haggle

Yes you can haggle!!

I did it at the Trafford Centre, Manchester, i got £224.21 knocked off a 15" MacBook Pro spec as listed in my spec below and that was list price machine of £1699 :D

I did some home work and played the Apple store off against an authorised reseller and the Apple store agreed to price match the re-sellers offer! infact they ended up bettering it :D

I can post my reciept for any sceptics out there! :D
 
Sn0wball said:
When buying a Macbook Pro?

Other companies like Sony and Dell allow you to on their notebooks, when purchasing directly from them.

Do Apple, too?

MBP prices in this country (England) are very steep. $2850 USD (£1,850 GBP) for a middle 15" (2.66GHz with 9400M+9600M GT) with the standard low stock values of 4GB, 320GB @ 5400RPM, with anti-glare and 3yr Applecare.
Click to expand...

why would you do that? even if you managed to get 25% knocked off the retail price ( which I promise you apple will NOT do) you are still paying an INSANE amount of money for dated technology with absloutley no guarantee of an update to macbook pro specs anytime soon.
 
bluefox9er said:
why would you do that? even if you managed to get 25% knocked off the retail price ( which I promise you apple will NOT do) you are still paying an INSANE amount of money for dated technology with absloutley no guarantee of an update to macbook pro specs anytime soon.
Click to expand...

why are you so sure he bought the machine yesterday and not nine months ago?
 
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