Modern rationalization eliminated pure haggling from city life
Evidence
With the general rationalization of business in the modern city, haggling, in its pure form, has largely disappeared. Many contemporary urbanites, even those with great knowledge of, and skills in, city ways, cannot play this game-as any number of tourists have discovered to their sorrow. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 980
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to Weberian rationalization themes and to the loss of face-to-face transactional skill that Simmel traces in metropolitan life.
- SEED: Angle: the disappearance of haggling as an index of how rationalized commerce destroyed a whole embodied literacy of strangers reading strangers.