Haggling

Haggling is expected here at all the street markets, and boy are there a lot of them. There are also tons of indoor markets as well. In these markets, you can find row upon row and stall upon stall of … well, frankly, Chinese crap. Chopsticks, fake Jade figurines, bracelets, stamps (so you can stamp your “Chinese” name on paper or something. They’re called chops), all kinds of Buddhas: traditional Buddhas, happy Buddha … I saw one that was just a Buddha head, and you could turn it around and see a variety of different facial expressions: happy, angry, sad, stricken, bemused … ok, I just threw those last two in there, but I wanted to be sure you were paying attention. You can get all kinds of Mao paraphernalia, including a lighter with his face on it. When you open the lighter, it plays the Communist anthem. It is quite possible the schlockiest thing in China, and I really want one. Darn the TSA and their pesky rules!

You can’t really go anywhere in these markets without someone trying to get your attention to sell you something. “Hello lady, look-a here.” “You friend, give you nice price.” I bought a packet of postcards the other day. The woman started out by asking 150 yuan, which is about $18. Needless to say, I wasn’t about to purchase postcards for $18, even if they were gorgeous. Anyway, I offered 20, and she started to come down in price. I stayed at 20 yuan, saying that’s all the money I had. At one point she said “Now you come up , you offer more”. Now here’s the key – and I kind of wish I’d had this lesson before I bought my car: Walk away. I told the woman I just had 20 yuan and I walked away, to which she said “ok, ok,” and I got the postcards for 20 yuan. Here’s the kicker – I think someone else in our group had gotten them for 10, and I was kind of mad. The bottom line of haggling is you really just need to be happy with the price you got if it’s something you want. Walking away is a really good technique though – I’ve found that for stuff I don’t even want, I’ve got people chasing me down to give me a lower price. While at the Muslim market in Xi’an (an experience, and if you ever get a chance to go, walk all the way through once, figure out what you want, and then go back and bargain), I was looking for a mah jong set for a friend. Most of the sets were plastic and not very nice. Some were what looked like bamboo and bone, but since I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I couldn’t be sure. The only thing I had to go on was the memory I have of my parent’s mah jong set which is actually quite nice with lovely images on the tiles. So I used that as a comparison against the sets I was seeing in this market. Most of them were nowhere near as nice as the one I remembered – they had fewer tiles, the tiles were smaller, the bone layer was very thin, and often they looked they weren’t attached very well to the bamboo. Plus, the pictures were often not very nice and not pretty, and were small and hard to see. So I finally found one I could potentially consider purchasing, and it came in quite a nice wooden box. So I asked how much, and he started off at something like 500 yuan, which was ridiculous, and $60 to boot so of course I said (playing the haggling game, of course) that it was too much. He offered something slightly lower, pointing out the nice wooden box (not, please note, anything redeeming about the actual mah jong set), and told me it was a good bargain. I didn’t particularly think so, and we went back and forth a couple of times. I then decided it was too much money for what it was, and not very nice, so I told him I wasn’t interested and I walked away. He started hollering numbers at me as I walked away: “250!” “200!” “Ok, 100!” It was quite a drastic reduction. I was not tempted by shoddy merchandise … no I walked away, and bought shoddy merchandise somewhere else. Don’t ask me what, I don’t remember.

I found shopping at the markets a little stressful, because for me, shopping is a tactile experience; I just have to touch. The second you touch something, the merchants are on you trying to sell it to you. The big thing at the Muslim market was silk pillow covers. I don’t know if they were actually silk, but some of them were quite pretty. Whenever I looked at them, because I wanted to see what they had to offer in the way of color and design, the merchant would come over to me and give me a running commentary on what each pillowcase design was: “Bamboo. Birds. Red. Dragon.” These were all things I could plainly see, and yet I got the information. I suppose it is part of the patter. It’s not unlike car shopping, I guess In the case of car shopping you get the rundown of all the features: 50 million horsepower! 20 cylinder engine! Sushi chef in the trunk! GPS system and satellite tv on the dash. With silk pillow covers you have far fewer options, so the salesperson is reduced to pointing out the obvious.