“Open at 10, 15% of what they offer,” they said, “especially if you’re obviously a 外国人(foreigner).” A few months ago, I was hearing this kinda thing all the time — in this case from one of the study abroad briefings, but also from my brother, his Chinese friends, and apparently everybody else who has ever been here. That all sounds well and good, but for those of you who haven’t done this before, imagine finding a jacket on sale in mall or something being sold for $60, and just take a second to think about how weird it would be to look the shopkeeper straight in the eye and tell him “yeah, I’m only paying six for that.”
Because it’s weird as hell. I mean, I guess I’ll get used to it but for now it’s still extremely bizarre, particularly considering how cheap things are to start with. In that example, for instance, the jacket wouldn’t be 60 bucks, it’d be 60 人民币， or roughly nine USD. And you have to act like paying nine bucks for a jacket is outrageous, because obviously paying ninety us cents is much more reasonable. They of course won’t do that, so they’ll haggle you up to 25% of original asking price, and you leave with like a $2 jacket. Most normal thing in the world.
So yesterday, I was in this mall down by the Beijing Zoo, which I actually haven’t been to yet but I’m sure will happen pretty soon (get pumped for future pictures of pandas incoming). It looked like this, except this was by far the neatest, most quiet, and most organized corner in the store. Anyway, this lady in the middle had a bunch of shoes in a very small space, and I wanted some. I hadn’t ever haggled on my own before but it’d seen it done, and I wanted to go out that night for July fourth.
So I go in, ignore the salesperson, and pretty quickly pick out some Nikes that I _kinda_ like; I can’t overstress here how important it is to only appear moderately interested, because the more you look like you want something, the more you’ll have to pay — which might (I don’t actually know) be one reason why girls on average get worse deals than men. I mean, I bet when a girl finds that one purse that matches perfectly with her most adorable dress and she absolutely has to have it, the salespeople can tell and exploit that.
I ask how much they cost, and she won’t tell me, probably because she wants to see how much she can trick the stupid American into paying for fake Nikes. She instead goes to get them in my size and lets me try them on and walk around before she’ll even start to discuss price. Eventually, though, once I look relatively happy with them, she offers 280元, a little over $40. I say I want to pay 50, because I’m not quite ballsy enough to ask for 4 dollar shoes yet.
Note: Her price wouldn’t be particularly unreasonable in the US, but then again shoes there would have been real, and therefore probably wouldn’t have such obvious issues with quality. Here, though, paying anywhere in the ballpark of 300 kuai for anything short of a full, tailored suit is utterly ridiculous.
To the victor go the bootleg spoils
In any event, I probably could have done way better, but I’m still proud anyway, damn it. Was gonna talk about July 4th here but the post was getting a bit long and it wasn’t that interesting anyway. 再见！