ASIA: Exploring Shanghai

After arriving in Shanghai, Bill [Bridges] and I set out to explore the city. We soon found ourselves walking down a one-kilometer stretch of highly developed commercial real estate that was basically the largest outdoor shopping mall either of us had ever seen. Almost as soon as we got there we were approached by a person frantically shouting “Prada Gucci Rolex CDs DVDs TVs Ladies...”. He seemed to offer everything you could want and had the extensive product offering pamphlet to prove it.

As we continued walking down the mall, we were approached numerous times by similar vendors. In fact, they all began with “Prada Gucci Rolex CDs DVDs TVs Ladies...”, had the same pamphlet, and dressed in the same monochromatic manner. Within twenty minutes of walking through the mall, we must have been approached 30 times. This doesn't even include the highly entertaining game of spotting a vendor coming towards you, acting as if you are walking to one side of a pillar, and then using that pillar as your lead blocker - cutting to the other side, and leaving them wondering what happened. We soon realized that all these vendors were salesmen for the same company.

How could this business be profitable? As price mavens, we were consternated. How is it worth your time to sell an assumedly limited selection of DVDs when I can walk five blocks over to a DVD store and search a veritable library of 6 RMB (less than 1 USD) DVDs, without having to deal with a shady street vendor, moreover? Where do they even keep all this inventory? Policemen patrol the mall. As this business is illegal, vendors presumably keep the inventory out of the public's eye in a brick-and-mortar location somewhere close.

Even if they do manage to pique my interest, I'm going to haggle with them until I get a DVD down to 3 or 4 RMB (less the 50 cents), and will spend 30 minutes haggling over products I have no intention of buying - just to see how low I can get the price. How many customers do you think this thundering herd of salesmen can entice in an hour? Four or five maybe, if that? And unlike other clearly unprofitable and insolvent companies we have visited in China (such as a government-run Beijing silk store selling $5,000 USD rugs that we saw no other customers in for an hour), these people clearly couldn't be backed by the government - they sell counterfeit goods after all.

So why are there 40 to 50 of these guys wandering around the same one kilometer by one block stretch of land? Anybody with any insight into this, feel free to shoot me an email...

--Paxton Flesher (PWF3K@virginia.edu)