Negotiating for the sake of negotiating is never appropriate. It’s only appropriate if you believe what is offered is not reasonable based on the job, your experience, etc.
If somehow you bring more to the table than the other six people, yes you should get paid more. But if you bring the same thing to the table as they do, you should get paid the same.

I wouldn’t have even come up with the $72,500. If you offer $65,000 and she says that’s not enough, but won’t tell you what is enough, then she is just playing games.

I have worked a number of food/retail jobs both full and part time. Generally in those types of job, I have found the pay to be set and non-negotiable. They always just told me what it was and that was it.

Because it seems kind of odd to ask for more pay than the other six people that do the job you do.

But I think the big thing is that I was told that there’d been some kind of restructure imposed from higher up and therefore the position itself didn’t exist any more. i.e. I wasn’t left wondering what I’d done or said that caused the sudden change.

She said that was lower than she was hoping for – but refused to give us any idea of what she was looking for.
The CFO had been quite impressed with her, and decided we could go up to $72,500, which is generally what someone in the same position after 2 years makes.

She came back with ‘I’ve had an offer from another company for $90,000. Surely you can meet that.”
We replied that we couldn’t and wished her luck at that other company.

She responded 1 more time stating that she was ONLY asking for $20,000 more and surely we could come to an agreement.
I advised her to take the other offer, as we were not going to go any higher than the $72,500 we already went up to.

Upper management cancelling the whole hiring process partway through is something that happens rather often from what I’ve seen. I imagine all the candidates then writing to Ask a Manager to say, “I was so far through the hiring process and then they just dumped me! Did I do it wrong?”