In the 1950s, Talcott Parsons, then Garfinkel's PhD adviser, worked on a manuscript in which he explored the “institutionalized one-price system” as a standardized feature of consumer markets (see Garfinkel 1967, 69). In a version of this manuscript published in Parsons’ and Smelser's monumental Economy and Society (2005 [1956]) the authors suggest that consumers internalize the normative basis of the institutionalized one-price system in the process of socialization and, therefore, do not engage in bargaining. This observation occasions Parsons and Smelser to argue that the one-price system “tends to eliminate bargaining over price in the immediate transaction” (p. 158).

Garfinkel (1967, 68–70) refers to the “institutionalized one-price rule” in his Studies when discussing one of his now so-called breaching experiments. In this experiment he asked his students to bargain for items sold at a standardized price. At this point of the Studies Garfinkel also introduced the often-invoked notion of the “cultural dope” as “the man-in-the-sociologist’s-society who produces the stable features of the society by acting in compliance with preestablished and legitimate alternatives of action that the common culture provides” (p. 68). He uses the experiment with his students to elaborate on this notion by suggesting that sociologists often consider participants as cultural or judgmental dopes when they ascribe their behavior to “rule-following.” By the same token, they tend to overlook the possibility that participants decide to avoid situations that can become ambivalent and uncertain if standards are being challenged.

Lynch (2012) has examined discussions about Garfinkel's notion of the “cultural dope” by examining the bargaining experiment. He begins by highlighting that the experiment unsettled students at first, but after the event many of them reported that they had been successful in obtaining a bargain and would continue to negotiate for price reductions. Rather than arguing that Garfinkel and ethnomethodology offer a counter-model of the actor as “a fully conscious, self-reflexive rational agent,” Lynch 2012) emphasizes that for ethnomethodologists actions and interactions are embedded within concrete circumstances. He then offers two interpretations of the results from Garfinkel's experiment.

In the “conservative reading” (Lynch 2012, 227), the experiment reveals that in supermarkets people tend to pay the standardized price without challenging it, but in exceptional situations might consider bargaining.