For our last day in Beijing, I scheduled an afternoon and evening event, with the thought that we could do any needed shopping in the morning. We hadn’t really figured out where we should do our shopping until we ran into the man who was an agent for one of the swimmers who told us of Silk City and the ability to get great deals. Then, I remembered an entire section on “shopping” in my book on China – and remembered it had mentioned Silk City as well. The idea was that it was a negotiating experience – the vendor offered an initial price, then you countered with something much lower – like 25% of the initial price, and then you negotiated. The book recommended even walking away in order to get an even better price. This sounded like a good idea, so we decided Monday morning we would head over to Silk City for our shopping experience. I was originally only thinking of a few souvenirs, but the agent made it seem like something where you could get some really good deals on lots of stuff, so my original thought of “shopping” started becoming more a thought of “SHOPPING”.
Given that we had no idea of how to get there, the time it would take, the size of the marketplace, or the things to consider, we decided to take a test run on Sunday afternoon. We decided we would at least find out where it was, walk along the market, see what they had to offer so that we could be as efficient as possible on Monday. So we took a taxi and headed off. The taxi dropped us off in front of a large store with a few fast food restaurants in front of it. We walked up and down the street, looking for the “market”. I imagined something like an open market like I might see in Mexico or Argentina, but it wasn’t there. So we went inside the store. It was then that we saw “the market”. It was an absolutely sensory overloading scene. It was row after row after row of cubicle like “booths”, filled with similar merchandise – each booth with a salesperson inside, trying to hawk their wares. Each floor had different themes, but the booths in each floor were mostly the same or very similar merchandise. My guess is that there were easily 300 or more booths per floor. You simply walked up and down the aisles and each sales person barked at you to somehow catch your attention and pull you into their booth to get you to buy. Man, oh man, -- talk about selling. The female Chinese salespeople were unbelievable. Within our first 10 minutes, we got our unexpected introduction to Chinese selling.
Emily and I started walking down the aisles. We were “just looking” which was of course, our plan. We truly had no intention of buying, which made it a bit more interesting, because we could genuinely walk away from anything, but perhaps we would get a better idea of the right price range when we came back on Monday for the actual selling. In retrospect, now I realize that we were absolutely the most valuable target that any Silk City salesperson could want when we walked in, because we had no packages and hadn’t bought anything yet. I assume that means they believed they could make the most amount of profit from a “newbie” and that they were anxious to get us first. We passed some booths of jeans (it looked like a 100 different types) – and we thought, “how would you buy jeans without being able to try them on, since there were certainly no dressing rooms). We passed booths of winter jackets and ski wear – we certainly didn’t need any of those. Then we passed a both of women’s stylish overcoats. Immediately Emily spotted a cute tailored overcoat – one that looked like it would be really cute on Emily. The very “moment” our eyes stopped to gaze even momentarily at the jacket, the lady salesperson leaped out at us, asking Emily if she wanted to try the jacket – at it seemed at the same time, not even waiting for the answer, but ing the coat off the hanger and before we knew what was happening, she already had one jacket arm around Emily’s arm and was turning her around to put on the other. We chuckled and let her finish putting on the coat. One thing we learned quickly – with the smaller size of the Asian people, it seemed like all of the primary clothes displayed were exactly Emily’s size. Anyway, it fit perfectly and was very cute. Definitely something we would have to consider tomorrow when we came to shop. So we smiled and told her we were just looking today and were not planning to buy. Immediately, she launched into about 10 reasons why that didn’t make any sense, why the coat was so beautiful, why she would offer her a good deal and “best price”, why since she was so pretty she would make us a good deal…and that was in one breath. Again, we smiled and politely declined and tried to go on. The next thing we knew, she was offering us an outrageously high price – something like $150 (she was quoting us yuan, but I’ll translate the prices to dollars). Of course, we said “absolutely not” and that it was way too high of a price – not realizing that this was her way of drawing us into starting to bargain…when we didn’t even want to bargain. So we again started to walk away, and she then started to offer us lower prices. We kept trying to walk away and her prices kept on coming down. She kept on asking us to name a price – so finally we told her that we were only looking to buy tomorrow something in the range of $30 and that since this coat was obviously too high for that, we would keep looking – there were certainly other coats we could look at. As we walked away, she kept pulling us back and the price came down, down, down. Finally, she said – “fine, I’ll give you your price” -- $30. Emily and I looked at each other because we really weren’t going to buy anything, and told her that was a good price but we weren’t going to buy anything today and that we were just looking, and emphatically kept walking. As we walked away, she kept calling out “okay $25”,… “okay $20”. Wow. We had just been there 5 minutes and already had an intense experience with almost feeling forced to buy something – and yet having seen the price come down 5-7X if we were just willing to walk away. Pretty interesting. So we kept going to see what else was available. Little did we know that our first experience would be only a precursor to our second experience.
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