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.