@RuthlessOne: I believe you also stitched the price information together, like I did after I read it for the first time:
The sales woman (SW) wanted 28700 sense (F$) for all 7 crates, but Carol offered 45000 F$ total FOR THE ORE, which didn't make sense and so I decided the "28700 F$ for all 7 boxes" must have been a typo and the SW meant "per crate", so 200900 F$ total for the ore. And then Carol somehow managed to haggle her down to a wooping 50000 F$ for all 7 crates.
So going down from the initial 28700 F$ to ~7150 F$ per crate, at which point I also wanted to call bullshit on this, as ores are non-perishables and even if a trader wants to empty her/his stock and bought it at a lower price then 28700 F$, noone right in their mind would give such a discount.
But, then I reread it and it turned out I was wrong. Ketima already posted it how it was. I just post this here to clarify it. The 45000 F$ in total offer included all the ore AND the spices which they settled for 25800 F$ at that point, so 45000 F$ - 25800 F$ = 19200 F$ instead of the 28000 the SW offered at that point (700 F$ discount). That would have been nearly 10000 F$ less, just as MC stated. In the end they settled for 50000 F$ total, what means they bought all 7 ore crates for 24200 instead for the initial 28700, which is a reasonable discount for the SW, who wanted to empty her stocks for the new higher quality ore anyways.
@Meridis: I got that she listened in on the latest information they passed by. Yet she made so incredible good use of those information, like knowing, that if the weather gets better, a whole swarm of traders will begin to aggregate on said country to sell salt, that I wondered how she became THAT seasoned. Her knowledge looks to be on par with a well experienced at least middle aged merchent or at the very least on par with a
veeeery well trained young adult merchent in training, instead of a child/young adolescent, who has been a slave for the last years (a good chunk of her life).
And this is, where CountryMage and I don't agree on: The only explanation for this is, that she used aaaaany source available (hanging around the market place, chatting with merchants, reading books), which CountryMage and I believe she all did. But I don't believe, that this would have been sufficient to be that well versed and therefore imho the author overdid it on this one.