The phone feels slick in my hand. It’s not actually wet, but my palm is producing a thin, pointless layer of moisture, a biological response to the dead air on the other end of the line. He’s just given me the speech. You’ve heard it before. The one about rising material costs, about supply chain volatility, about how he’s already giving me the best possible price. He says it with a tone of practiced empathy, a vocal performance designed to make me feel like we’re on the same team, struggling together against the chaotic whims of global logistics.

I used to believe negotiation was about this. The performance. The dance. I spent years thinking it was a soft skill, a kind of linguistic judo where you use your opponent’s momentum against them. I read the books, the ones with titles about getting to yes or splitting the difference. They taught me to build rapport, to find common ground, to mirror body language. I once spent an entire negotiation for a design contract trying to subtly mirror a client’s posture over Zoom. He kept leaning to his left, so I leaned to my left. He steepled his fingers, I steepled mine. I felt ridiculous. I secured a 5% increase instead of the 15% I needed. The whole time, I was so focused on the “art” of the deal that I never bothered to do the arithmetic.

My biggest mistake, for a long time, was believing the frame. The frame is the story the other person tells you. And if you accept their story-that material costs are the real enemy, that they are a powerless victim of the market-then you’ve already lost. You’re just haggling over the scraps they’ve left on the table. It’s an oddly trusting way to conduct business, especially in a world where verifiable truth feels increasingly scarce. Trying to get a straight answer can feel like trying to explain how a blockchain works at a dinner party; you see the eyes glaze over, you use metaphors that fall apart under scrutiny, and you end up just saying, “It’s complicated, but it’s the future, trust me.” Nobody trusts you. They just nod and hope you’ll pass the salt.

That’s the core of it. We’ve been told not to trust, but we haven’t been given the tools to verify.

It’s not a dance. It’s a database query.

Let me tell you about Riley S.-J. Riley is a typeface designer, which is one of those professions that sounds impossibly niche until you realize their work touches everything you read. She’s brilliant. For a new font family she developed, she wanted to do a limited run of 235 specimen books-gorgeous, thick-stock prints that feel substantial in your hands. Her work is meticulous, and she requires a very specific acid-free, high-cotton paper stock from a specialty mill in Europe. Her supplier, a US-based importer, is the only one who carries it reliably.

And they knew it. When she asked for a price on her latest order of 5 pallets, the quote came back 25% higher than her last one, just six months prior. The email was polite, almost apologetic. It cited port fees, fuel surcharges, the usual litany of inflationary pressures. Riley felt that familiar slickness in her own hand as she held her phone, reading the email. Her budget couldn’t absorb that kind of increase. A 5% or even 15% jump would be painful, but this was a project-killer. Her first instinct was to call and plead. To talk about their long-term partnership, to build rapport, to do the dance.

I’ve changed my mind about all that. In fact, I’m starting to believe that “rapport,” without information to back it up, is a liability. It creates a friendly fog that prevents you from seeing the hard edges of the transaction. Riley didn’t call. She didn’t write a pleading email. Instead, she started digging. In our world of opaque stories and unverifiable claims, there are a few places where the truth is recorded with boring, beautiful, and ruthless consistency. One of those places is the manifest of every single shipping container that enters the country. You don’t need a password. You just need to know where to look. By reviewing publicly accessible us import data, you can see who is shipping what, to whom, and in what quantity.

The Asymmetry: Riley vs. The Conglomerate

Pallets of paper stock, monthly average.

Riley looked up her supplier. She saw their shipments, week by week, laid out in clean, undeniable rows of data. She saw the 5 pallets of her specialty paper, sure. But she also saw something else. She saw that every month, like clockwork, her supplier received a massive shipment of 355 pallets of various paper stocks. And the consignee for that shipment wasn’t a small design studio. It was a multinational printing conglomerate, the kind that prints glossy catalogs for car companies and fast-fashion brands. A company with colossal bargaining power.

The story about “rising costs” started to look different. It wasn’t a lie, necessarily. Costs probably were rising. But the story was incomplete. Her supplier wasn’t a small boutique operation struggling against the tide. They were a high-volume player moving hundreds of pallets a month, and their business was anchored by a whale of a client. The price Riley was being quoted for her 5 pallets wasn’t a reflection of the market; it was a reflection of her perceived importance. The extra 25% wasn’t for fuel. It was a small-customer tax.

This is the asymmetry. The supplier knows their own business, their costs, and their other clients. You, typically, only know what they choose to tell you. When you gain access to their reality, the power dynamic shifts completely. You are no longer negotiating from inside their story. You are introducing a new story, one based on their actual business operations.

So Riley wrote a new email. It was friendly and professional. She didn’t accuse them of anything. She didn’t mention the conglomerate by name. She simply changed the frame. She wrote, “I’m planning my production calendar for the next 18 months and expect my paper needs to grow to around 45 pallets per year. Looking at your import volume, it’s clear you have the capacity to handle partners much larger than me. Could we discuss what a pricing structure looks like for a growth-oriented account? I want to ensure we have a long-term, scalable partnership.”

Her phone rang 35 minutes later. It was the supplier. The tone was different. The practiced empathy was gone, replaced by a focused, professional attention. He wasn’t talking to a small artist anymore. He was talking to a potential 45-pallet-a-year partner, someone who, he suddenly realized, might understand his business better than he thought. The conversation wasn’t about his rising costs anymore. It was about her future volume. She didn’t get the old price. She got a better one. It was a 15% reduction from the original quote, landing her right back where she needed to be.

She won by replacing mystery with math.

She didn’t win by being a better talker. She didn’t use clever psychological tricks. She won before she ever picked up the phone. She won by replacing mystery with math. She found the data that mattered and used it not as a weapon, but as a source of light, illuminating the real context of their business together. That’s not a soft skill. It’s a structural advantage. And it’s available to anyone who is tired of dancing in the dark.