Shopping is to China, I think, as sports are to the Olympics. This is the land of the Hard Sell, the mecca of over-the-top haggling and although I’m little more than a beginner when it comes to proper negotiating, I’ve learned enough in the past 4 days to put together a brief treatise on the subject. (I use the word "brief" only in the sense that I have not divided this piece into chapters. I apologize in advance for the length, I’m writing this on the plane home, and 3 hours is a pretty long time to digress on just one topic.)
One of the first things they teach you in "shopping school" is to look around, compare prices, hunt patiently for that elusive "best deal." Talk to as many sellers as you can, and learn how to decide which one is likely to give you the most bang for your buck. This is coincidentally the one thing you shouldn’t do in China’s flea markets.
Upon entering Xiangyang — one of the largest centers of bargain-shopping in Shanghai — you are immediately struck by the similarities in each vendor’s wares. The shops here fall into one of four basic categories: shoes & clothing, bags, jewelry & trinkets, or consumer electronics. Each store that belongs to one of these categories will have similar stock, so there is actually not much point to navigating the depths of the market because you will see pretty much the same thing (more on this later).
My trip to Xiangyang was about one thing, and one thing only: bags. I had decided, for some weird reason or other, that bags would be a nice thing to bring home to all my friends, so I had bags on the brain upon setting foot in Xiangyang’s narrow, tented corridors.
Diesel seems to be the brand of the moment when it comes to bags, and the number of fakey Diesels here were fairly impressive. There were also quite a few Samsonites, Pradas, North Faces, Nikes and other high-end names available, but it was the fakey Diesels that presented the best-buy in my opinion. Even if the workmanship turned out to be shoddy (it wasn’t), it’d just improve the whole deconstructivist look of Diesel’s current line of bags.
So Diesel it was. I spent my first half-hour there getting myself lost inside Xiangyang’s labyrinthine innards, and popped out on the other side sweaty and confused. I watched shoppers of all levels of expertise haggle and quibble, and saw vendors do various song-and-dance routines to lubricate the purchase.
The Xiangyang Sales Process for Tourists goes like this (and I say this from having taken part in more than 10 separate instances in the space of about two hours):
Buyer approaches stall. Vendor takes notice, and approaches buyer. Buyer fiddles with various items, feigning disinterest. Note that the buyer already knows what they want, but must mask this knowledge for at least a minute or two.
Finally, the buyer asks the vendor how much a particular item is. Even though most vendors can’t speak English, they will recognize the words "How much?" Note that this is, in the vendor’s mind, the same as saying, "I want to buy this item," so use these words sparingly. DON’T ask how much an item is if you don’t want to buy it, because you will end up haggling for something you don’t even want and will just be wasting your and the vendor’s time. The flea market is for buyers who know what they want, not buyers who are just "looking around." That said, you can use those first few moments upon entering the stall to familiarize yourself with the various items on display, as long as you don’t ask how much it is.
So, assuming you’ve already asked the vendor how much an item is, their next move is to bring out a calculator. This is for your benefit, and not for theirs. They’ve already memorized pretty much any combination of items and their respective values; the calculator is just there so that the contested price is clearly displayed. (Also, it helps the language problem a bit since they sometimes don’t know words like "hundred" or "thousand.")
I’ll use my very first purchase as an example:
I was looking at a fakey Prada laptop briefcase, which the vendor’s calculator said was worth 320 yuan. (This is about a third of the price of a real Prada case, by the way. I actually considered buying an original one in Manila a few months back, but bought a Samsonite backpack instead.)
Now, I already had a vague idea of how much you could get one of these bags from eavesdropping on another negotiation in another stall, so when she handed the calculator to me, I typed in 150. (The vendor, by the way, was this really cute Chinese girl who kept pawing me while we talked.)
At the sight of the number I had just entered, the girl’s eyes immediately went wide. "150?!? No no no … too low, mista, too low! 320, mista!" Of course, being the newbie that I was, I was a bit taken aback by her reaction. Could I have made a mistake? Was 150 really an abnormally low price?
I half-heartedly stuck to my guns though, more out of pride than anything else. "Well I think 150 is a pretty fair price for this …" I said, although my resolve had been battered.
"No, no, mista, 150 too low! I no profit, mista!" She pulled the calculator away from me and, after a moment’s thought, stabbed out another number. "280," it said.
The number encouraged me a bit, because it seemed like she was willing to barter a little. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the exact same song-and-dance that every buyer gets, before they reach a price that both parties are comfortable with.
I frowned at the number, and said, "That’s still too high for me." I adjusted my backpack and walked a few steps to look at her other merchandise. Apparently, she thought I was starting to leave, so she immediately grabbed me by the arms and pulled me back. "Wait wait mista! Ok ok! My best price mista! Best price!"
The calculator flashed "220."
It was at this point that I had an epiphany about the whole selling process in China. After spending 3 or 4 minutes bargaining with a customer, the vendors were more afraid of not making a sale than of being on the losing end of a negotiation. A razor-thin profit was better than nothing, at least in their estimation.
With my newfound confidence, I whipped up my most convincing disinterested look, and shrugged, "I can only afford 150, sorry …" I made to start leaving again.
The girl looked like she was ready to start mock-crying. Her grip on my arm tightened. "Please mista! I not go home tonight! No 150 mista!"
The calculator flashed again. "180," it said. "Best price, mista! Best price!" she exclaimed.
I wasn’t sure if she was ever going to let go of my arm, so I tried to pull away again. "Come on, 150. I’m not paying more than that," I said.
"Ok ok mista! I tell you, give me a little please … no 150, give me a little!"
I thought about it for a few moments, and finally said, "Ok, 155."
She tittered, "155?!"
"Well, you said ‘a little’!"
"A little more mista, please! I give you big discount already! You give me a little too!"
"Ok ok fine, 160. There. How’s that?" I started adjusting my backpack again. At this point we had been talking for more than 5 minutes and I was getting impatient.
Sensing that this was the most she’d be able to get from me, she slowly acquiesced. "Ok ok mista, 160! Big discount mista!"
And she went off to stuff the Prada into a white plastic bag for me.
It was only much later that I realized that I wasn’t getting a very large discount at all, but was still in fact, paying for a lot more than this bag was actually worth. Although I was mostly correct in how I performed during the whole routine, my big mistake occurred at the very beginning of the conversation, i.e., I said "150."
In reality, "150" was the most I was willing to pay for this bag (or "160" which was a small enough difference that it didn’t really matter), so I should’ve started with a much smaller number, say, 100 or maybe even 80. Even if I was totally off and the bag was actually really worth more than that, the girl would’ve kept haggling until the price had increased to within that range. She wouldn’t have thumbed her nose at me and told me to piss off.
I had, in essence, conducted half of the negotiating in my head by naming a mid-range price, instead of letting her "convince" me of what the actual price should have been. By all estimates, I could’ve probably bought this bag for as little as 80 if I was a better shopper.
The rest of my experience at Xiangyang went pretty much the same way, with me mistakenly naming prices that were higher than I should have. My mother, who is infinitely more skilled at this than I am, was buying 250-yuan skirts for as little as 50 or 60, so that should give you an idea of just how aggressive the negotiating can be in this place. (She did mention however that some of the vendors were pissed off at her after each purchase, a fact which I probably wouldn’t have been comfortable with.)
Going back to my point at the start of this article, there is little to be gained from canvassing prices in this situation because the rules here are just totally different: the discount you get is roughly equivalent to how long you are willing to struggle with the vendor. If you are willing to spend 10-15 minutes on each item you buy, then you will almost certainly have heftier savings than someone who can only spend 1 or 2 minutes per item. It’s all about resolve, I suppose. Don’t even bother trying to figure out what the lowest possible price is for something, just tell them what you are willing to spend, and let them figure out how to accommodate you.
The "walking away" trick, which I inadvertently used my first time out, works for practically any vendor in this city, including some of the salesladies in the department stores. It’s not a hard and fast rule of course, but it speeds up the process significantly if you show that you are willing to walk away and look for something else.
In later transactions, I was able to go from a starting price of 120 to the final sale price of 60 in under 2 minutes, by pulling the walking away trick very early on. Granted, the item itself wasn’t worth very much, so common sense seems to dictate that you only pull that maneuver when both you and the vendor have invested a certain amount of time in the haggling process, and there is slightly more money at stake.
It’s a tricky kind of gesture, and I guess you’ll only get a sense of when to use it once you’ve had a lot of time to try it out. (I once tried it while haggling for a Bluetooth headset, and was totally ignored by the salesman when I started to walk off. Although I really wanted the headset, I ended up with nothing because I had pretended to not want it at all.)
So what’s the big lesson here? Nothing, really. Just that bargain-shopping in Shanghai is one of the most interesting interactive experiences you are likely to have if you’re a tourist in this city. I think that a large part of the experience is the actual bartering, and not so much that stuff that you’re bartering for. That said, you stand a fairly good chance of actually saving money on the stuff you choose to buy, as long as you remember one thing: these people are really, really good at what they do.
I finally caught Sin City last night, after putting it off all last week. I’m embarassed to say that I almost fell asleep while seeing it though … whatever half-baked crime noir Robert Rodriguez was trying to pull there just wasn’t working for me, and practically all the good fx shots had already been featured in various promotional footage, so eye candy-wise I wasn’t really seeing anything new.![0000011800094117[1].jpg](/img/pics/0000011800094117[1].jpg "0000011800094117[1].jpg")
![Mr_and_Mrs_Smith_845_medium[1].jpg](/img/pics/Mr_and_Mrs_Smith_845_medium[1].jpg "Mr_and_Mrs_Smith_845_medium[1].jpg")
Was lucky enough to catch