Timing is money: managing the floor in sales interaction at street-market stalls

Abstract

This article considers ‘pricing’, that is, offers and requests for the price of sales items, as a communicative practice deployed by vendors and customers during sales interaction on street markets. It examines the organisation of sales interaction by pursuing the question of how and when market participants, vendors and customers alike, embed offers and requests for price information within their interaction. The analysis suggests that pricing is deployed as a technique to manage the ‘floor’ and the interaction at the stall. For example, offers for items are being tailored to customers’ display of interest and commitment to particular items, and requests for price information are deployed in ways that challenge anticipated offers, that is, offers that are about to be made by a vendor. The data, field observation and video-recording have been gathered at market stalls in London and Berlin.

Keywords:

• street markets
• pricing
• timing
• sales interaction
• communicative practice
• focused ethnography
• video

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues at the Work, Interaction & Technology Research Centre (King’s College London), in particular Christian Heath, Jon Hindmarsh and Paul Luff, for their contributions to the analysis of the data. I also would like to thank Rene Tuma (TU Berlin for his help with the collection of some of the data, Katie Best (London School of Economics) for her help with gaining access to one of the markets, Finola Kerrigan (University of Birmingham) for a her valuable comments on the paper and the reviewers and editors of this journal for their insight into the analysis of street market interaction. Most of all I am grateful to the market vendors and their customers who allowed me to film their interaction on markets.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dirk vom Lehn

Dirk vom Lehn is Lecturer in Marketing, Interaction & Technology and member of the Work, Interaction & Research Centre at King’s College London. His principal research interest is in examining interaction with and around technology in museums, optometric practices and street markets. He has previously published ‘Discovering Experience-ables: socially including visually impaired people in art museums’ in Journal of Marketing Management (2010; Vol.26(7–8): 749–769).