My wife and I were looking for some shoes and we approached a small shop on the island. It was a hole-in-the-wall among a row of other little shops. The woman behind the counter watched as we picked things up, and her daughter worked beside her, restacking whatever we set down and disturbed. Nothing had a visible price, so every purchase began as a conversation.
She was Black, as were many of the people we encountered in Roatán, which was part of why we came. I speak Spanish. I've been learning the language over the last three years or so, and I admit I was a little proud of it, but it bought me nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. She had us clocked as tourists before I opened my mouth, because we were tourists, and because you stick out whether you open your mouth or not.
She said fifty American dollars for the hat and the knockoff Crocs together. Fifty was a number for tourists, and she and I both knew it, so I did the thing I never do when I travel: I pushed back and named a lower number. My wife was easy about all of it, right there beside me, and we landed at forty, still not that much lower.
Then I put the hat back, because I didn't need it and never had. So forty for two became twenty-five for one pair of knockoff Crocs. Less money in her hand, no upsell. The deal I had pushed us toward, if you'd even call that a deal.
It's okay, my wife said, putting no weight on it. Just put the hat back.
The woman turned to her daughter and said quietly, in Spanish: No dejes que perdamos esa venta.
Don't let us lose that sale.
I don't know whether she knew I understood her, but I laughed a little on the inside, kept it off my face, and still felt like I had done something wrong. Not like I had gotten a bad deal. Like I had sinned somehow, though I could not have told you against what.
i don't haggle
I didn't start seeing a therapist because of capitalism. I started because I couldn't send back a plate of food.
If the order came out wrong, I wouldn't say anything. I'd just eat around it. Flagging down a waiter, even ours, felt like making myself a problem, like being difficult was a worse offense than being shortchanged in silence.
My wife, on the other hand, has never once carried that weight. She'll change half a menu without thinking twice about it.
The worst they can say is no, she says, and she means every word.
So that became the work, small stuff, week after week. I'd check in: this weekend we went out, and I grabbed a waiter without thinking about it or even stopping to check whether he was ours. It was probably the busboy. Again, the kind of win that almost sounds like nothing, and maybe it is nothing, but it was not nothing to me.
I was the one who said it aloud, weeks before the trip: the real test will be the haggling, the tourist markup. I built it up as the final exam, which means the thing in that shop wasn't just something that happened. It was an assignment I gave myself and flew 1,200 miles to take.
What I had been hiding behind "I don't haggle on trips" was that I take the markup, and I tell myself it is just the cost of being a guest in someone else's country, a small tax for getting to be there at all. But I was not being generous. I just did not want the friction, and “generosity” made for a better story.
Because I negotiated my rent. I negotiated my tech salary, hard, with numbers rehearsed in the mirror and levels.fyi open in another tab.
I have no moral hangover from either one.
None.
So why was that fine, and why did a hat I didn't even keep, in a shop in Roatán, feel like a moral failing?
up, and down
It took me a while to see it, and once I did, I couldn't unsee it.
I am fine "doing the capitalism" when it feels upward: against the landlord, the company, anyone bigger than me and holding more of the cards.
That is David versus Goliath, and everything in my formation blessed it. The little guy pushing back against the powerful is righteous. That was a story I had a script for, one I had been handed in the pews before I could even read. But there was something underneath that I almost missed.
At home, the line along which I usually understand power is race, and on that line I am almost always the smaller party, the one the system was not built for. That was part of why we had come to Roatán, to spend a week somewhere I wasn't the exception. But she was Black, and her daughter was Black, and race was not the line that had gone live in that shop; passport and purchasing power were.
The same things that made me the bigger party also made me a tourist. I had carried my American dollars into a place full of Black people and worked out, a little late, that I was not David in this setting. I was probably closer to Goliath.
On the line that mattered in that shop, I was not the smaller party. I had American dollars and a plane ticket home. This was not me pushing upward. I was doing it downward.
I had no script for that. For being the one with more power and still wanting to leave the shop feeling like a decent man. I had no idea what decent was supposed to mean there.
we don't have a word for it
I wrote an entire essay about necessary asymmetry, arrangements in which one party holds most of the power but is expected to exercise it kindly. I was thinking about parents and pet owners then, but I was not thinking about myself standing in her shop, trying to figure out what decency required of the stronger party.
But I had already made the decision that one of us was stronger without even noticing it.
what i used to do with this
There was a time this feeling had somewhere to go, and that somewhere was prayer. When I felt hopeless inside something this large, I prayed for a better outcome, and I don't think the prayer wasn't a request for help. Because I was using it as a way to hand off the problem to a third party. Meaning, as long as I was praying about the system, the system was God's to fix and not mine, and I got to stand inside it as a fellow sufferer. Innocent, hands clean.
The one who is done to, never the one doing. Then I took him off the throne, and the responsibility I had been handing him did not disappear with him, but came right back to me.
All of this is made up. This is all our doing. Things I say and think about pretty often, except now it means I'm not just someone wronged by the system, but I am also a participant in it.
So the shop did not expose me as a hypocrite, but it did expose me as involved. I was not capitalism’s victim in there. I was just a guy doing it downward to a woman who seemed to need the upsell more than I needed the hat.
the supplicant is gone
So this is the grief, and it took me a long time to call it that.
Deconstruction took away my belief in a god, sure, but it also cost me my innocence: the version of me that got to feel hopeless and stay clean, the one who could pray about the asymmetry instead of thinking about his place in it. So I keep writing like I lost a belief, but I lost a self too, and I am still mourning the supplicant.
He had it easier than I let on, because he got to be small and blameless at the same time. Now he is gone, and what is standing in that shop in his place is a participant who has to choose, on purpose, which way he leans.
the sale
Now, I could leave this part out of the story, because it ruins the clean shape of the guilt.
While I was over there building a whole cathedral out of my guilt, she had already turned to her daughter and said, Don’t let us lose that sale. She was coaching her daughter through the sale. It was not that far from what I do in a salary negotiation, except she was doing it in real time, in a language she may or may not have known I spoke. The Spanish I had been proud of turned out to be good for one thing: overhearing what was never meant for me.
She was not the victim I had written her as.
The trouble was that I had written a play with victims in it at all. I cast myself as the bigger party, sinning gently, very moved by “the weight of my own power.” Even my accountability had found a way to make me the lead. The passport and the exchange rate didn't disappear at the counter, but neither did they settle everything question inside the transaction.
She set the opening price, and she also had the thing I wanted to buy. There were other shops on the same street, and she could have refused any number I named, and at forty, she was the one who said yes. She was negotiating, the same as me.
So naming myself the “powerful” one and her the “powerless” one took something from her too. I was still assigning her a role in a system she did not build, all so I could find somewhere soft to land. And then again, the negotiator is a story too.
Maybe she was annoyed about not capturing the upsell. Or maybe she had forgotten me by the next customer. Maybe it was the best sale of her day or the worst. I don't know, nor do I get to know.
Who she was in her own afternoon was never mine to decide, and even the generous answer is still me answering for her.
after the asterisk
I don't know what I would do differently next time, and I've stopped pretending that not knowing is a failure to resolve. Maybe I haggle and tip the difference, or maybe I even pay the markup on purpose.
There was an imbalance there. I had the passport, the exchange rate, and the freedom to walk away and fly home. Her being good at her job did not erase any of that, but it also was not the morality play I kept trying to make it.
It was simply two people making a deal, one of whom was still trying to work out whether he was the hero or the villain, though he was mostly just a customer.
It turns out the supplicant and the believer left by the same door; I keep finding rooms he used to stand in. But I promise I didn't expect one of them to be a hole-in-the-wall shop in Roatán, Honduras, selling knockoff Crocs.