This practice turns off honest customers who just want good work at a good rate. Those customers will just not call you, or go to a competitor who has lower no-bullshit face pricing
People are irrational beings, and so are customers. We will rather buy something that's on sale from 100 to 80 than the pretty much same item that's selling for the regular price of 70. Stores artificially raise prices and then offer discounts, why shouldn't freelancers?
How would you feel if, upon asking for a discount (say, 10% off a $100k contract), I offer to instead raise the base rate just for your contract, so it costs the same in the end, but you can also say you got a discount?
I had a buyer for a big corp tell me to increase my base price because the discount I offered wasn't big enough. As you might guess, her bonus was tied to the percentage discount she was able to get from her vendors.
It depends on who needs who. If you have enough customers that you can afford to avoid haggling with a buyer, then that's great for the seller. If the seller is deciding between no money and some money, then they might have to haggle. Right now, I'm lucky enough that I don't have to haggle when I sell my services. It saves both me and the buyer time, because they know they can't afford me and go move on.
