After a couple of days watching television coverage of a certain sector of society’s idea of “shopping” which seemed to basically involve smashing a window and grabbing whatever they could, it was rather nicer to stroll into a supermarket a few evenings later and see the more normal understanding of a retail transaction taking place. People were queuing up at the checkout, putting their choices onto the conveyor belt, allowing the checkout staff to bleep it through and actually paying for it.
For a moment there, it began to look as if this was going to become an unusual event when the mob had taken it upon themselves to rob from the whole of the community, sometimes with no apparent sense of the actual understanding of the monetary value of the stuff being nicked. Whilst I can kind of understand why someone on a limited income could see the appeal of getting themselves a “free” TV set that they might struggle to afford under more normal circumstances, seeing someone nabbing themselves a multi-pack of potato crisps from a “pound” shop does rather confuse me.
Mind you, the English have always leapt at the chance of a bargain, even if that bargain isn’t really a bargain at all. Why else have those so-called “pound” shops become so popular? We seem happy enough to accept that something is crap just as long as it’s cheap crap.
Shopping experiences in different countries can seem very bizarre no matter what bazaar you happen to be tempted into. American shopping always managed to catch me out due to my misunderstanding of local taxes. In a lot of cases, the price on the ticket isn’t the price you pay because the local “sales tax” is added at the checkout. Coming as I do from a country where the price on the ticket includes the centralised VAT in the price you see, this always manages to throw me a little, as I can never quite work out how many dollars are going to get taken from me. Add into that the bizarre vaguaries of the exchange rate charged to your credit card and that “nice little bargain” can end up costing you an arm and a leg.
However, I still prefer that system because I actually understand it. Comparing it to my rather pathetic experiences in the Souk last year whilst traveling in the middle east, it at least made a kind of sense. This is not to denigrate the systems in place over there for a moment, it’s just that if it’s not what you’re used to or have grown up with, you can very quickly start to feel a bit like a rabbit trapped in the headlights of an oncoming juggernaut.
Strangely, I really feel intimidated by a system where you simply don’t know what price you are expected to pay rather than simply having to guess. It bothers me. Already you are in an unusual mental place by trying to calculate the exchange rate in your head as it is, but you can very quickly start to convince yourself that the local currency is merely Monopoly money and lose all track of what you’re actually being asked to pay. All the flattery and schmoozing that seems part of the process doesn’t help when you’re being offered a cup of refreshing local tea and a few jokes to guilt you into hanging around. Add into that the need to possibly offer a paltry counter-offer, the sort of thing that a dyed-in-the-wool traditional idea of a typical Englishman might consider socially “awkward”, and you know that you are going to walk away with some goods you’ve paid far too much for and feeling wretched about it, if you’re that kind of person. Wealthier, more self-confident folk seemed to stroll away positively skipping at having put one over on the locals, and I didn’t much enjoy seeing that happen, either.
You see, there is such a lot of abject poverty to be seen in certain quarters of these countries, it seems churlish to resent putting a few more pounds than necessary into the local economy. After all, the money you manage to save might be as little as you might pay for a round of drinks at the bar, but could keep an entire family fed for quite some considerable time. One of the most bizarre things you can see in the bazaar is an obviously wealthy tourist attempting to barter by offering the kind of pittance for an obviously quite valuable item that might appear to be an insult if someone offered it to him for something like a Mars bar. Sometimes the disconnection from the way things work in the “real world” back home is unbelievable.
Unhappily, I returned from my own shopping spree with sense of having a rather bad taste in the mouth, knowing that I’d been taken for an fool and paid far, far too much for the tat I’d acquired. Happily, later on that same day, someone with a lot of local knowledge took pity on us, took us under their wing and escorted us through an exciting evening in the Souk which not only taught us a lot and made us feel a lot happier about how the whole system actually worked, but left us feeling a great deal happier with regard to our entire opinion of the country we were guests in.
Still, no matter how intimidating I found that experience in the bazaar, I would still prefer it to being faced with the kind of mob rule that was on display in my own country recently.
I find pound shops fascinating. Just how can they sell some of those wonders for only a pound?
ReplyDeleteI once bartered for some Bangles in Bangalore. I got the seller down to thirty percent of his initial price so was quite pleased with myself until my colleague haggled him down a further ten percent for theirs.