The Negotiation

The meeting room on the fourth floor of the supermarket's head office in Reading had been designed, Carmen suspected, to make visitors feel small. The table was long and very white, the chairs were slightly too low, and the only thing on the wall was a framed photograph of a cabbage. Beside her, her father sat in his best suit, holding a bottle of his own olive oil as though it might protect him.

Antonio Ruiz had been making oil from the family groves outside Jaen for forty years. It had won prizes in Madrid and in Italy, and a food writer in London had once described it as tasting "like a summer afternoon". But he spoke almost no English, and this was the first time a British supermarket had shown any interest. Carmen, who had studied in Manchester and now worked in Seville, had taken three days off to come with him.

The buyer, Helen Marsh, was friendly, precise and, Carmen quickly realized, extremely good at her job. "We love the product," she began. "We really do. The question is whether we can make the numbers work. We'd be looking at around twelve thousand bottles in the first year, at a price of, let's say, six pounds fifty per bottle to you."

Carmen translated. Her father's reply was short, loud and not suitable for a business meeting. Roughly speaking, it suggested that Helen knew very little about olives and even less about manners. Carmen smiled, turned back to Helen and said, "My father appreciates the offer, but I'm afraid that's quite a bit below what we had in mind. We were thinking of something closer to nine."

So it went for the next hour. Antonio delivered his opinions like a man throwing rocks, and Carmen caught each one and handed it over wrapped in tissue paper. "That's absolutely out of the question" became "I'm not sure we'd be in a position to do that." "She's trying to rob us" became "I think we might see the value slightly differently." Helen, for her part, kept saying things like "I hear what you're saying" and "Let me see what I can do," which Carmen had learned in Manchester could mean almost anything.

The breakthrough came, unexpectedly, from the bottle. Helen poured a little oil onto a piece of bread, tasted it and was quiet for a moment. "That's very good," she said, and for the first time she sounded as if she meant it personally rather than professionally. "My grandmother used to bring oil like this back from holiday. I haven't tasted anything like it since."

Antonio did not need a translation for that. He leaned forward and, in very slow, very careful English, said, "Small bottles. Better price. Same oil." Helen looked at him, then at Carmen, then back at him, and laughed. "Now that," she said, "is something we could work with." Within twenty minutes they had the outline of a deal: half the volume, a smaller premium bottle, a higher price per liter, and a trial in forty stores rather than four hundred.

On the train back to London, Antonio was in an excellent mood. "You see?" he said in Spanish. "I was right to be firm. They respect people who speak plainly." Carmen thought about the tissue paper and the hour of careful hedging, and decided that there was no need to tell him what he had actually said, or what she had said instead. Some translations, she thought, are best left unchecked.