You spoke, we listened!

Yesterday while taking my car in to get fixed, I overheard 2 employees (right there in the front room with me, and knew I was there) talking to each other about another car:

Employee 1: So we need to give this guy a discount or something so he feels like he's getting a good deal and will come back.
Employee 2: So what do you want to do?
Employee 1: How much do we normally charge for this?
Employee 2: About $360. So how low do you want to go then?
Employee 1: I don't know.  We can't do much lower.  Lets just raise the price in the computer to $400 and give him 10% off to make it $360 so he feels like he's getting a deal.
Employee 2: You can do that?
Employee 1: Yeah, it's easy, here I'll show you...

I'm not surprised at all that this happened.  I actually don't really care either.  That's business.  That's exactly what "sales" are.  It's called the anchoring effect. I was just surprised that they just talked about it right there with me listening to every word.

To their credit, we're actually repeat customers to this place now because there's another guy there who seems very trustworthy, who's worked on our car both times.  And in contrast to the story I just told you, he actually told me there would be no charge for what he did yesterday, when I was fully expecting to pay him something.