But if you are interested in doing that at a fraction of the cost, you should go to the 24 de Mayo Market — up the hill from the city's colonial center. If you don't have an arm or a leg to spare, this place is for you.
It might lack the mall scent that invites you to continue perusing until you find the item you are looking for. The 24 de Mayo market smells more like urine - an odor that really makes you think "I'm paying way too much for this."
But that is the price you pay for not paying too much.
Working your way through the market is a game of cat and mouse.
You walk up to one of the stores. The woman asks you what you are interested in, and you tell her. Then she gives you a price.
You mull it over, scratch your beard for a few seconds, and let the silence linger in the air. Then you respond with a counter offer, which the woman promptly rejects being way too low.
So you begin to walk away. At this point, the woman will give a counter offer that isn't what you are willing to pay but is headed in the right direction. So you stick around. At this point, you could repeat your original counter offer if you believe it to be a fair price or you could begin to compromise.
The back and forth continues until you decide upon a price, unless of course you are interested in buying a few items. In this case you leave the original bargain hanging at a price that you are pretty comfortable paying and mention that you might be in the market for another item.
The dance begins again and continues until you are satisfied.
Bargaining is not something that comes naturally to Ecuadorians - or at least that I have witnessed.
I'm not exactly sure why.
Maybe there is a whole social status attached to buying products, the sense that if you don't pay a lot for something then it's not very good. My roommate thinks that they lack the business savvy that says you won't pay more for something than you have to.
This reminds me of one of my favorite stories I have heard from my Peace Corps friends: The Story of the $76 Papaya.
There was a fair at my friend's site and a competition to see which farmer could grow the biggest papaya. Someone from my friend's community won with a gorgeous, organic papaya that weighed 14 pounds (Apparently, that is not a great weight for a championship papaya, but some of the heavy hitters didn't enter the competition for whatever reason.).
So the guy wins the competition and takes home the $75 prize. Then his wife turns around and sells the papaya for $1, which was well below the going market rate for a papaya of that size.
Either way, the lack of business savvy was something that initially surprised me when I got to Ecuador, but I have gotten used to it.
If you are interested in negotiating at the 24 de Mayo Market, a little practice in the art of negotiation can take you a long way.
We pretty much outfitted our entire apartment at this market (beds, mattresses, tables, chairs, couches, etc) and saved several hundred dollars in the process.
The first time we purchased stuff for the apartment at this market, we bought three beds, three mattresses, three small tables, a dinner table, five chairs, and two benches.
One would think that transporting these items from the market to our apartment on the other side of town might be difficult. But the pick-up truck drivers near the market are experts in packing things into and onto the bed of the truck.
With one long piece of rope, he was able to fit all of those purchases into the truck. When it looked like his architectural masterpiece might be a bit unstable, we asked him if he wanted to put something in the cab of the truck for transport. He says, "no, there is always space."
We made it back to the apartment with four people in the cab and all that stuff in the bed.
So when someone suggests that there isn't space to hole anything else, you just tell them that there is always more space.
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