Does anyone else sometimes feel like they are living their own version of Groundhog Day (the movie)?  I can’t really explain what makes me feel that way but sometimes, especially living in Shanghai, I seem to encounter the same situations and undergo the same struggles over and over again.  This reminds me of a story I heard on NPR the other day.  A woman was being interviewed about her extraordinary memory.  She was able to remember almost every detail of her life instantly.  She realized this phenomenon when she was a child.  She described a scene where she was sitting at the beach with one of her friends and she realized at that instant that the same datwe last year, they were also at the beach.  She mentioned this fact, which she assumed her friend knew, and her friend obviously had no reccolection of that.  From then on, she knew she had some special memory talent.

There was another portion of the interview where the woman, who was discussing a book she had just co-written with another memory doctor, described how she met her co-author.  She immediately remembered every single date that they met, going all the way back to the year 2000, something to the effect of :  Jan. 5th, 2000, March 18th, 2000, June, 13, 2000, etc.  Pretty incredible. (I will try and find the link to this story in a bit)

So anyway, although I am not nearly as burdened with the feelings of repetition that this woman feels, I do often have the sensation that I am repeating events in my life.  We have been searching for a new couch bed for several weeks and it was an exhausting experience.  One thing about China, at least from my perspective, the process of buying things is simply not as easy and trustworthy as it is in the U.S.  Part of it is just a different style of purchasing things.  In the U.S. I would kind of know already how I would go about purchasing something.  American people, due to the nature of everyone buying stuff all the time, already kind of know how to buy things, any types of things.  If I did not know, someone else I knew would know.  So the art of buying something, or even the art of know where to buy something is not the challenge.  It is more about finding what you like for a price that you can handle.

In China, things do not work that way, especially for some common items that even most Chinese people have.  In this case, the couch, I think its just because the couch is kind of a Western piece of furniture and although most people in China have one by now, there is not a culture of buying couches.  So what you have is a bunch of people who really don’t have any idea what to do when to buy a couch, where to go, what is a good price, what is a good product.  There is no used market (which is essential for cheap guys like me who don’t want to spend a pretty penny) and there are very limited places to actually buy nice couches.  The problem is that the middle of the road shop also does not exist.

You can go to the huge international company’s store and they have excellent stuff.  But they come at an extremely high price, probably more than what you would pay for the very same product in the U.S.  Then on the other side of the spectrum, you can visit what I like to call the ‘Fake Furniture Market’.  Although the products are not exactly fake per say, they are run in the same general ways that the fake markets are run.  They are all small stores, which have relationships with factories that make cheap stuff.  They all essentially sell the same products and probably have relationships with the same factories.  I literally saw this one shitty red couch in at least in ten different stores, so obviously factories are not going to make this same couch design in the same color, especially when its not a good design to begin with.  The other downside to these furniture malls, and I guess to the fake market in general, is that these places are not really stores.  They are like street sellers that happen to have a store.  They don’t have any kind of customer loyalty or customer satisfaction.  They are one-time sellers.  They don’t have a reputation or are government by any kind of business ethics.  They do their best to make a buck each and every day, just like the hagglers on the street.  This is a detriment to the customer because the guarantee for any product they sell is meaningless.

I think this is one phenomenon that we in the U.S. take for granted.  Stores are generally somewhat ethical and care to a certain degree about customer loyalty.  They don’t care a whole lot but they at least care a little bit because there could be consequences if they had absolutely no care.  So if they make a product that is of poor quality, that is the biggest potential disaster for the business.  But on a smaller level, its just pretty rare for a business to just completely not care what happens to the customer after a purchase is made or after they receive the money, or even what is being said during a potential purchase.  These things have consequences, anything from reporting the business to the business ethics organizations that investigate matters like these even down to hurting business by ruining their reputation.  Ahh, reputation.  That is the word that all of these small stores are completely missing in China.  And when you have no reputation, you have no reason to think about ruining that reputation.

So the consequence of this lack of reputation is that you can never trust these smaller stores.  You can’t trust them for anything because they will swindle you and cheat you and make false promises that probably they themselves don’t even know are false.   So in order to combat this, you must ask questions, even to the most ridiculous detail.  And then when you buy, you must have everything down on paper.  That is the funny thing about all of this.  Despite all of these businesses having no reputation and no customer loyalty, they will ALWAYS follow what is said in the contract.  You would think that if a company doesn’t care about being loyal to a customer, the contract would also be meaningless, but actually its the opposite.  They will follow that thing down to a dime.  If they make a mistake, they will always fix it.  SO the point is, if you want something done, make sure its in the contract.  I guess anywhere, that goes without saying.