Shopping with the master of disaster.

So, we were shut in most of the day yesterday between the annoying drizzle of rain and the low (for here) temperatures. Lucas, my sweet little idiot, was all ramped up on energy because the apartment really isn't big enough for him to safely release any. (When he starts things break. Or get annoyed. Or both. It all really depends on the sentience levels in question.)

Finally, after dinner, and after a few hours without rain, I'd had enough. After having browbeaten Joan for long enough we finally left the apartment as a family to take a longish walk.

Lucas has a new game, incidentally, that causes heart stoppage in the adults in his life. It follows these steps:

1. Run full-tilt down the sidewalk.
2. Suddenly collapse to his knees.
3. Follow that up with collapsing to the ground in a sprawl.

He loves it and plays it endlessly while we look on in shock (the first few times) and annoyance (Joan and her mother) or laughter (me).

This is where shopping enters the picture. While we were out, we walked past a small supermarket. I'd been there lots before but Joan and her mother had never stopped in. Since we needed some vegetables, Joan's mother decided to go check it out. (It turns out that some things are available there cheaper than the usual haunt.) I took Lucas inside partially for warmth and partially for the sheer fun of it.

Lucas, in his inimitable fashion, and after the initial wariness of someplace new, took to the place like carassius auratus auratus takes to oxidane^[1]. He ran up and down the (very narrow) aisles happily looking at all the strange stuff while his father desperately tried to keep up without knocking anything off the shelves.

Now, I've seen badly behaved children in departement stores before, especially in Canada where parents seem to think that it's perfectly OK for their children to pull things off of shelves, open packages, etc. In China this is more rare. Even by local standards, however, Lucas was a marvel. For example quite by accident we stumbled over the toy aisle. This was like kiddie crack for Lucas: dozens of interesting things that he wanted and wanted now. Here's the difference, though, between Lucas and tens of thousands of other children I've personally witnessed. He'd follow these steps:

1. Point excitedly at an item and say "要！" (want!).
2. Look expectantly at me with a grave face.
3. Listen to me gently say "no".
4. Move to the next item.
5. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Note the absence of any of the following:

• Tantrums.
• Whining.
• Clinging.
• Grabbing. (Well, he did grab one thing, but this was after looking at me and me nodding because I was considering actually buying one; I decided against on quality grounds.)
  

Other dumb things he did included playing shy with the store clerks (who subtly flocked in his general vicinity like flies to sugar) in just the right way to charm them and, get this, quietly going past the bulk candy (which he recognized excitedly) after being told, once again, "no".

I actually enjoyed going shopping with a toddler. Man, I must have done something really nice in my past life to warrant this kind of son!

^[1]Goldfish takes to water.

Printer Shafting

So, I'm getting a lot of good use out of my new HP printer (despite a few problems with the Linux driver that have yet to be fully worked out -- luckily I'm not printing photos!). Joan, when buying the printer, was already eyeing the price of ink nervously (the printer cost us 300RMB; one spare set of ink cartridges cost us 290) and got even more nervous when she noticed that I blew through the demo cartridge that came with the printer (3ml of black ink instead of 10ml, for example) with my first print job.

She was right to be nervous.

Printing at any kind of readable resolution sucks through ink at a prodigious rate. The printer manufacturers don't make their money from printers, you see. They make their money selling the ink cartridges. I have, since getting the printer, printed off five books on various things needed for my work (reference manuals in the main). Two books (of about a hundred pages each) is all I get per cartridge.

Luckily I live in China. In my neighbourhood you can hardly fling a brick without hitting at least three shops selling printer ink. And not just official cartridges, but, too, third-party cartridges (at half to a third of the price) and cartridge refill kits. These latter are the real life-savers.

Today I bought some ink refills. These are 30ml syringes (the black cartridges are 10ml, recall; colour cartridges are 8ml each colour) with the ink you need in the colours you need. Using them is simple: you peel back a sticker, insert the syringe, push the plunger and when the ink seeps a bit out of the hole you're using you're done. And they cost, literally, a tenth the price of the cartridge.

Going with the black cartridge (the ink I'll be using most often), that means that for one tenth the price of an official cartridge I get three times the ink. And refilling a cartridge is hardly difficult work! Fumbling with the packaging and tape of a proper cartridge means replacing a cartridge takes two to three minutes. Injecting the ink takes five. Hardly an onerous task when you consider that my print batches take hours.

Now sure, the ink quality isn't quite as good as the HP official inks. The black isn't quite so deep. The cyan/magenta/yellow isn't quite so vibrant. But it's still better than the official inks I used in my old Epson before it gave up its ghost and certainly more than good enough for the kind of printing I do (text).

So why would I want to be given the shaft by HP for its cartridges?

Well, I do blow my warranty away if they catch that I used an unofficial ink. On the other hand, if I refill my black ink cartridge three times, I've saved more than the price of a whole new printer....

Shopping Shell Games

Today was spent buying my birthday present (a new HP Deskjet D2368 printer). I had spent yesterday looking at printers while Joan and her mother were out shopping for clothes (without, as usual, buying any) and then the evening figuring out which printer would work with my Linux system.

I always have fun watching Joan while shopping. Joan is a natural bargainer who, despite always being friendly and polite and nice, manages to cut throats like a pro assassin. She will bargain for almost anything -- I really do pity the poor fool of a car dealer that mistakenly believes that he can slide one past her when we come to Canada....

What I noticed, however, that is really alien to we westerners in China, is the culture of deceit that pervades everything here. Taxes are avoided as much as possible, but only if the buyer is willing to trust that the seller isn't going to screw them over on warranties or the like. Fake goods are everywhere and quick changes can happen when your back is turned. Even something as simple as price tags are not indicative of the price -- they are the starting point of negotiation. Anybody who pays the price tag on any sizable purchase is a fool. This is true whether or not the place you're buying from is a major chain or a small corner shop, incidentally.

Starting prices can vary significantly depending on a wide variety of circumstances including:

• the seller's guess as to what you can afford
• what kind of relationship the seller has with his supplier
• whether the seller is a woman or a man (men tend to be more push-overs)
• whether the goods are legit or not (fake goods -- of any kind! -- are epidemic-level)
• whether you want an "official receipt" (tax receipt), an "informal receipt" (proof of purchase, but otherwise under the table) or no receipt at all
• how willing you are to just leave and not buy
  
• how many other people sell the same thing
• what kind of store is selling the goods
• what your skin colour is (the Chinese can be insanely racist at times -- and foreigners get stiffed, always)

How wide can this vary? Well, the lowest initial price we got from a shop was 320元 and the highest was 495. And the final price for what I got was 300, with an official receipt. (Joan is very good at "salami tactic" brinksmanship.)

Of course Joan then found out that the expensive part of printers isn't the printer, it's the ink. (290元 for a black and a colour cartridge.)

Another interesting ritual whenever buying anything major in China is the unpacking and verifying contents ritual. The printer I got was in an HP box with HP seals all over it and HP-branded packing tape covering every possible means of ingress or egress. Yet, before money changed hands, the seller brought out a carpet knife, deftly sliced the tape and seals, opened the box and showed us that it contained everything it was supposed to contain: printer, cables, manual, disk, trial cartridges, warranty card, etc.

I've been buying computer hardware all of my adult life in Canada and never felt the need to open up branded items to verify contents, but here it is necessary. If you don't do it, you will get ripped off someday. I know this because I know several foreigners who did get ripped off this way: "1GB" flash disks, for example, that turned out to be deftly switched for 256MB ones -- all sold without a receipt, of course, so no way to get what you were supposed to get. The seller has notoriously short memory when faced with a customer he's ripped off without a receipt....

(Just a friendly clue: never buy anything in China that's worth more than about 10元 without a receipt if there's any chance whatsoever that you may need to trade it in or get it repaired.)

So, anyway, fun observations at an end, my day ended well with a nice new printer and another blog entry about the weirdness that is my life in China.