I've had luck saying "is there anything I could possibly pay to make this better for me?" For instance, I got my car sprung from a Chicago city impound, where it would have sat over a weekend racking up fees (they wouldn't release it until I got a licensing thing worked out, but the impound lot tow guys would tow the car out of the lot for me for a couple bucks).
There's a fine line between good writing and verbose writing.
I'm taking a writing class right now, and they really stress that real-world examples explain your argument better and make the writing more interesting, and I think that's actually true.
That said, giving too many examples makes it too long to be worth people's time and/or bores them with too many examples that are too similar.
This is quite interesting when you take into consideration what the author was doing: haggling. It's usually a mute point, as many don't talk about how/where/why they haggle as the action is under the radar - particularly here in the US.
Certain cultures outside of the States embrace haggling as a predominant means of exchange, i.e. in China via tuangou: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuangou
