Jess gets scammed

Friday afternoon two of my friends and I went to explore the Old City of Jerusalem. We explored around, but kept finding ourselves being totally harassed by the shop owners. You walked down through the narrow street crammed with little shops and tons of different things to buy all in your face. Very chaotic. The owners of the shop try anything they can to get you to get in the store. So the first one that got me was this guy selling tapestries. The apartment I am living in is super bland so the tapestries would be perfect to spice it up. I asked a simple question of how much it cost and got taken in the store. The guy wanted to show me all the colors, I kept repeating – “Just tell me how much it costs!” over and over, but no luck. He got out all the colors, asking me which I liked the best. Finally (like 10 minutes later) I tell him the red one, but I don’t want to pay more then 30 shekels (less then 10 bucks). He goes – “No! I’ve never sold for less then 120! I could never, that is too cheap.” Continued...

Then I get this whole sob story of how business is tough during the war, his family is starving, and no one comes to the shop anymore. Seriously, this all came out. I tell him maybe 40, but no more. He goes down to 70, then 50. But really, I don’t even want this thing any more and just want to leave. But the shop owner is blocking me in the store! I was literally pushing him on his chest to move him out of the way and he was keeping me inside. It was nuts. So I tell him forget it, I just want to leave, I don’t want to buy it for 40 anymore – and as I am leaving, he sells it to me for 30!

I got a good deal with that purchase, but the process was so annoying I was done buying things. The only thing else I wanted was a pair of tie up pants that a lot of Israelis wear around here. I found them at this other shop and the same thing happened as before! Oh the war, I have no customers, how could you ask so cheap? Blah Blah – and I ended up getting them for 25 shekels!

While these were great deals, the methodology of their sale tactics was very annoying. Basically you have to ignore a million people asking/begging you to look at what they are selling. As Americans, it is really hard to just ignore someone asking you questions, but you have to here just to be able to walk down the street. Also annoying is that if you are ignoring and walking by fast, there’s no way to look at things you might want to buy. A cool thing I did see was this booth of bulk spices, it was so beautiful just to look at, all out in the open.

But after a bit of all this, I am a pro. No one can get to me. I just walk down the street with my friends like I’m totally deaf. This works until I get past one shop where the owner doesn’t drag me anywhere, but asks if I can spell phenomena for him. Of course I can’t, but my friend can. Once we had stepped inside, our demise came with out us even realizing it! First the owner wanted to make us a pendent for free for our necklaces. Told us how nice and kind we were, and wanted to give us a present. Woops.. the owner never really made the pendants, instead just started to and in the mean time showed us all this unique jewelry and told us about his family and the shop and Israel. It was amazing. I had no idea how sucked in I was getting until he was asking me how much I wanted to buy this Jewish Star pendent for. I told him I didn’t want it, I mean I was wearing one right then – I definitely didn’t need two. But he wanted to give me something to remember the place by, yada yada yada.. it went on believe me! In the end, my friend and I walked out of there with 2 necklaces we didn’t want, but a funny story none-the-less. Here’s a pic of my new best friend/annoying scammer .