Context matters. When I walk into a high-end store and see a shirt on sale for $X, I assume that I need to pay $X to get the shirt. If I see a shirt at a flea-market priced at $Y, I assume I can get the shirt for some percentage off by just bargaining. The sellers are also aware of this context and, presumably, set their prices accordingly. The same thing regularly happens in business. For most services, people understand that pricing is not fixed and act accordingly. They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in.
>They are not (necessarily) jerks, they are just reacting to the context they are operating in.
That's a good point and honestly is often caused by the seller in the first place. A lot of tools used by businesses are intentionally not priced or priced on a floating scale so that the sales team has an opportunity to introduce fake discounts to make the sale, but ultimately this signals to the buyer that negotiation is part of the transaction. Almost all enterprise software and hardware sales work like that. Often the buyer would rather have a set price upfront than how to deal with the haggling process but it's the sellers that are creating this problem.
Doing business in the Middle East, we ran into the mistake of not intentionally pricing 20% higher than what we were actually aiming for. Even if you’re not actually looking to negotiate, you still need to keep a buffer for the negotiator to claim he’s done his job effectively — and some room for his boss too.
Doing contract work, I usually find that eventually extra work gets identified during the project; no one wants to do the paperwork around a change order (or more importantly, explain to their boss[es] why a change order is needed), so the easiest solution is to pad the initial pricing to account for it, and then when it comes up do it pro-bono. The larger the company, the more you buffer, as the paperwork gets worse and the misidentified scope becomes more likely.
And then of course a lot of companies end up with “yearly budgets”, and are price-insensitive as long as you stay in their remaining budget. Not pricing as much as the budget allows is just leaving money on the table.
That is, the floating price isn’t just some sales fuckery to trick buyers into bad deals (although it probably often does happen) — there’s some legitimacy to the madness. And buyers love haggling; IME it starts with haggling on direct price/effort, and then with haggling on scope. They want the project price to be fixed after haggling, not before.
