Shopping in China is different—no supermarkets, no big department stores, and not many fixed prices. Woe betide the housewife who doesn't like to bargain or who doesn't know how. Her budget won't last the month. Her husband may also be an indifferent bargainer although he may expect her to save his pennies by driving prices down to an irreducible minimum.
In shopping for food, the housewife has two alternatives: she can go to market or she can wait for the market to come to her. Vegetable and fruit peddlers ply the residential areas with their two-wheeled carts, each calling out his wares in a musical chant. Butcher carts come around, too. Or if the preference is for cooked food, it can be purchased from the noodle man, the sweet potato vendor, the corn-on-the-cob roaster, even from non-specialists who can dish up a full-course meal for somewhere around 24 cents. Such peripatetic restaurants are especially popular with midnight-snackers.
However, the market offers the biggest variety of food. Except when rushed by other duties, the housewife—often accompanied by a husband who likes to pick out some choice morsels himself, though sticking up his nose at the drawn-out procedure of settling the price—will make a daily trip to the district market dealing in fresh foods.
Taipei, which has a population of more than one million and is the largest city in the island province of Taiwan, has some 50 markets. Such a vending area is always within a few minutes' walk of home. Most markets are established by the government, some in permanent structures, some under canvas. Stall space is rented by merchants and competition is keen, although prices and bargaining procedures tend to be about the same.
Main stalls sell vegetables and fruits, beef and lamb, pork, chicken, duck, and fish. Canned goods dealers also purvey eggs, grains, flour, sugar, and similar bulk goods. Except for meat, neighborhood shops also may deal in the same commodities. The advantage of the market is that it has a large supply congregated in one place and prices there may be a fraction of a cent lower.
The energetic housewife shops early in the morning. Market supplies start arriving at 4 a.m., and the housekeeper who gets there first has her choice of the best. By noon, supplies of vegetables and meats are depleted, especially just before weekends and holidays. However, the market remains open until 10 or so at night. As long as one article remains to be sold, and one prospective customer might show up, the hard-working shopkeeper will stay on the job.
Facts of Pricing
Prices may, as a matter of fact, be lowered as the end of the shopping day looms larger and larger. Goods will be pawed over and wilted, but where low price is the primary motivation, the housewife may drop by in the evening to see if she can pick up a bargain.
Daily shopping is a necessity because few markets possess refrigeration facilities, nor do most Chinese homes. Among upper and upper middle economic groups, the home refrigerator is becoming a necessity, as in the United States and Western Europe. But even a small locally assembled model sells for more than US$200, and this prices it well beyond the reach of an average family. For Taiwan's nearly 12 million people, per capita income is about US$121 a year.
Among the better-heeled, the amah (or maid-servant) probably will join in the shopping chores. She is as hard a bargainer as her mistress, who knows price levels down to the last penny. An ardently economic amah may be permitted to keep the small change she saves—or will be rewarded in some other way. Besides, bargaining is fun and part of the culture. To pay the asked-for price is to lose face with the retailer.
As anywhere in the world, pricing is seasonal. Taiwan is subtropical. Vegetables are at their best and cheapest during the winter. Enough greens (always popular in Chinese cookery) for a family of four ordinarily will cost a couple of cents. Meat is higher, of course, and the Chinese do not eat such large quantities of it as Westerners. Pork is cheapest, and for a family that can afford meat every day, the cost might run as high as 25 cents, but rarely more, except on festive occasions. Beef is not of Kansas City quality but cheap and quite adequate for Chinese approaches to preparation. Although popular with Chinese, chicken prices remain comparatively high. Duck is cheaper. Ham, sausage, and other preserved meats are cheap and excellent.
Fruits are plentiful—oranges of various kinds, bananas around the calendar, delicious pomelos (huge grapefruit), watermelons and cantaloupes, litchi nuts, small but sweet man-goes, large and luscious papayas. In season, the price is low. Out-of-season, the fruit is only for the wealthy.
Market goes to shoppers in two-wheeled car (File photo)
Supply is lowest and price highest after a typhoon, which always takes a high toll of vegetable plantings. Prices also edge up just before a major holiday, especially the lunar new year of January or February. The government exercises price control, but this is only partly effective when demand exceeds the supply.
Caveat Emptor
Vegetables, fruits, and meats are ordinarily weighed on a stick scale that the customer watches closely. Its construction is simple, and while it has no springs to become involved in trickery, the barest amount of sleight-of-hand can scuttle the best bargain ever driven. In a Chinese market, the rule is always caveat emptor.
Another difference from the Western supermarket is packaging and wrapping. Paper and plastic bags are beginning to creep into Chinese retailing. Also, the island is beginning to manufacture Kraft type papers. Favorite wrapping materials are lotus leaves, especially suitable for meats and fish, and old newspapers. Some boxing—both of cardboard and tin—is to be found in luxury packing of cookies, crackers, dried meats, and various Chinese delicacies. Shoppers carry their own shopping bags. If they do not, stall operators will gladly tie purchases together for them.
In the event several purchases are made at a single stall, the ever-handy, ready-reckoning abacus is there to figure up the bill. Competition between abacus and calculating machine has proved that the former is quicker for the simple arithmetical calculations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Its accuracy seems to equal that of a cash register. Skilled operators rarely make mistakes. The housewife, who may use an abacus herself to do her household accounts, can watch the procedure, secure in knowledge that she will spot the moving of a wrong button.
Downtown Stores
Around food markets, neighborhood shopping centers inevitably grow up, and offer the consumer the approximate advantage of a department store. Goods ordinarily to be found include furniture, hardware, stationary, dishes and glassware, utensils, shoes, watches and clocks, textiles, clothing, electrical supplies, and small appliances—and such services as laundry, dry cleaning, dressmaking, bicycle repair, keymaking, and so on. Scattered through the area will be bakeries, fruit stalls, dry food shops, grain retailers, and the ubiquitous snack and drink stands.
Chinese can live well without going downtown, but most of them get to the central shopping area with considerable frequency. Movies are centered there, and movies are popular with Chinese people of all economic groups. Admission charge for adults to a first-run film is about 25 cents. Downtown shops run the same gamut of merchandise as their neighborhood cousins but with much larger stocks and choices. Clothing and shoe stores tend to dominate. Large restaurants are available as well as the sidewalk stalls.
Many downtown stores are trying to establish fixed prices. But bargaining is so ingrained as a Chinese shopping custom that the system is catching on slowly. Price tags are rarely displayed.
Downtown stores also offer some foreign goods, especially on a consignment basis. The merchandise comes from students, travelers, smugglers, and the American post-exchange and commissary. Sometimes the government cracks down on such outlets, but most of the time they are permitted to operate and service the needs of those few people who are well enough off so they don't care what they pay. Prices usually are two to three times what they would cost in a free market such as Hongkong.
Another attraction of the central shopping district is that of sidewalk vendors selling everything from combs and penknives to sheets. Bargaining is mandatory here. The offered price may be two times what is paid. Such sidewalk displays can be found on the busiest streets from 9 in the morning until 9 at night. A variant is the merchant who lays out his goods at the edge of a roadway, often because there is no sidewalk. Operations of these vendors customarily begin at 6 p.m., when traffic has begun to lighten sufficiently to permit use of part of the street as a display window. Clothes are the most common item, but there are also shoes, watches, kitchen utensils, and others.
Chinese tend to keep away from the so-called foreigners' shopping street that stretches from the downtown section to the hills of northern Taipei. Rightly or wrongly, they maintain that prices are much higher there than at the markets where foreigners are rarely to be seen. Those Chinese who shop in the area are mostly those from overseas, or who have lived abroad for lengthy periods. They are willing to pay the higher prices in return for supposed advantage in styling or quality—or perhaps for frozen foods or foreign canned and packaged foods that are not to be found elsewhere. Some specialized services also are offered, such as shoes made to order.
Pattern Repeated
Except for luxury goods, the pattern of Chinese shopping is repeated through the smaller cities and towns of Taiwan. There is a universal tendency toward the central food market, its satellite shopping area, the downtown core of more sophisticated shopping and larger supply, and the handy custom of peddlers for those who prefer to let the merchandise come to them.
A full-course meal is available at sidewalk restaurants for about 24 cents (File photo)
No matter where he operates, the Chinese businessman expects to work long hours. Invariably, he combines his place of business with his home. A thrifty Chinese merchant would shudder at the thought of paying rent for a place to live as well as a place to sell goods. His question would be why? As long as there is a place to cook, to eat, and to sleep, who would want to waste money on additional living space?
Chinese business people are as astute as they are hard-working. That is why changes are beginning to invade the long-established customs of Chinese shopping. Bargaining is time-consuming. It costs the shopkeeper money and may reduce the consumer's purchases. As indicated previously, thoughts of price fixing are beginning to enter Chinese retail consciousness. So are tendencies toward sale prices, advertising, more attractive packages, clean and neat displays, and other attributes of modern merchandising.
In time China will have department stores and supermarkets—maybe even shopping carts and cash registers. Shopping will be quicker, more hygienic, and probably cheaper. But it won't be as much fun. Poking through the food market in search of a particularly succulent morsel of pork for her husband's favorite dish, the housewife meets her neighbors, sniffs a wonderful world of special smells, and knows the joy of daily combat over price.
Shopping in China is a good outlet for tensions and frustrations. There need be little fear of being overcharged, because—as the Chinese say— "to be cheated once is to learn a lesson." The present system has its faults and its economic wastefulness, but it will be missed.
Where else can you find the thrill of a bargain-basement sale every day and still keep your husband happy when you get home?