Offshoring and Flattening of the world in the Blink of an eye
In the chapter, while analyzing an experiment at Chicago area car dealers, he points to how “Even after forty minutes of bargaining, the black men could get the price, on average, down to only $2,551 above invoice. After lengthy negotiations, Ayers’s black men still ended up with a price that was nearly $800 higher than Ayeres’s white men were offered without having to say a word.”
With my distinctly South Asian features and accent, I am no Warren Harding but I got to experience and observe the reversal of the ‘error’ that Gladwell points to. In the early nineties, when I first landed in the US, and was looking for a car at the local auto dealership in the heart of the Midwest – Kentucky – the salesman wouldn’t give me the time of the day. I was distinctly ‘foreign,’ probably without a credit history, with questionable finances. The salesman literally told me that to my face (something the dealership later apologized for when I wrote to the manager, but that’s a different story).
Fast forward to present day. It is interesting to observe how younger South Asian and Indian expat ‘kids’ on offshore engagements, walking into a Honda, Toyota or other auto dealerships get kid-glove treatments (pun intended). It is probably because in the blink of an eye, the sales-men/women now equate them to the ‘white male’ in Gladwell’s narrative: seen as knowledgeable, internet savvy and possibly with a high-tech job that pays well. This ‘thin slicing’ happens subconsciously even while the kid walks into a dealership, thanks in part to the hype over the flattening world (apologies Tom Friedman) and buzz in the media over offshoring. A phenomenon, one could call the reverse of Gladwell’s description of spotting the sucker: spotting the buyer!
