Social Engineering: Haggling - Broken?

[Snoman314]

First of all let me say that I'm not sure I've got the rules understood correctly.

I've got a player who's playing a merchant, so I sat down to wrap my head around the haggling rules in Social Engineering. As far as I can tell, a player can always haggle the merchant to their best possible price, provided the player's initial offer is sufficiently extreme, regardless of their character's skill. This is very metagamey, but it's going to be impossible to avoid to some degree, as far as I can tell.

Social Engineering, pg27

The merchant will lower his price or raise his offer in response. If the Quick Contest was a tie, the amount of his adjustment will be identical to the PCs’. If the PCs won, increase the adjustment by 10% times the margin of victory. If the merchant won, reduce it by 10% times the margin. The merchant will never go above his initially determined best offer, or below his initially determined best price; at that point his position is, “Take it or leave it.”

It seems to me that the idea is this: If the PCs lose the quick contests of skill by a lot/a lot of times, then the merchant will compromise less, and the point where the PCs counter-offers and the merchant's counter-offers meet will be closer to the merchant's desired price. That sounds great as far as it goes, but what's to stop the PCs from starting out at an extreme initial offer, so that the merchant always ends up at his best possible price? (Obviously the GM can stop stupid offers, of say $0 as a start point when buying, but where do you draw the line?)

Here's an example, following the rules as best I understand them:
-After influence/reaction rolls, the GM determines that the NPC merchant will make an initial offer of $1100 and be prepared to go as low as $1000 (the NPC is selling).
-The PCs respond to the initial offer of $1100 with a counter of $500.
-The NPC lowers his asking price by %10 of the difference - new price $1040.
-The PCs counter by increasing to $600.
-A Quick Contest is rolled, and the PCs lose by 5. The NPC would lower his price by $100 (the amount the PCs adjusted by), minus 10% times the NPCs margin of victory (so 50%). This takes the NPCs adjustment to $50, except that that would take him below his minimum price, so he says "$1000, that's my final offer".

In that example, the PC still got the optimum price out of the haggle, despite losing the Quick Contest by 5.

So, am I doing it wrong? Anyone have any thoughts?