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Q: Is all of China just one big Bait and Switch scam?
At KFC : No we dont have chicken here at KFC but we have a beef rice bowl. You have that.
At an( empty ) hotel : Yes I know we advertise our rooms for 500 but those rooms are ( permanently) full. We only have the executive room for 800.
Buying a cell phone: Yes it is 50% off but you must pay the remaining 50% in credit for data!
As a whole : Yes I know we advertise 5000 years of history to the world, but thats not available right now, but you can see this amazing replica of Venice we have poorly copied!
I wanted to buy a new car. Imported, 280 HP black on black. Later I was told. Umm actually our company is going to stop importing this car, so for the same money you can have a domestic ( broken) , 220 HP old man cream, on cream leather one! AND, it has 2 extra inches of leg room in the back!
Why would anyone just put up with this on a day to day basis? Dont consumers understand that no where else in the world would customers put up with this crap??
Do you think there has ever been a single person who works in retail that has said " Man, if there is a hell, im going!" ???
What about you guys? If you go into a KFC for a burger and they tell you " No, you cant have that, have this instead" Do you just accept what they offer or do you walk out??
Or when you go to McDonalds at 2am on the way home looking for a burger and they tell you meiyou, we only have chicken. Wait.. I can't get a burger at McD's ?
Buying an electrical appliance. I look at what's on the shelf and decide what I want and they tell me meiyou. Why have one on display if you don't actually have any for sale?
For me, it depends what I'm trying to buy but usually I just go elsewhere. It can make shopping needlessly drawn out and frustrating though.
SwedKiwi1:
I generally find that shopkeepers and restaurants just like saying mei you. So they will take every opportunity they can to say they don't have it. For them it doesn't seem to matter whether you buy something or not.
Golden rule: 1 meiyou and I'm out. No time to waste with a seller which either does false advertisement or has a bad supply chain.
But honestly you've not been in China since yesterday, that's how it works here. It's not about your needs, it's about the supplies they could grab for cheap.
I don't compromise. I buy what I want or nothing. If it's not there I'll search it somewhere else.
Most of the purchases are online anyway, so it's quite easy.
Depending on the mood, in other situations, I can just walk away or deplete my Chinese curses vocabulary.
ATMs that have no cash, or don't let you deposit cash, despite being a freaking deposit/withdrawal ATM, and only one of them working as it's supposed to work, so I need to wait in line behind people depositing/withdrawing their whole savings. 妈的发克.
China's a joke.
Every day...."cold beer?" "don't have."
I fukn hate this joint. The only reason I live here is because I'm a loser.
The famous bowl of meiyou, which is actually one third of the whole menu... Supply chain or management of the stocks failure. Filed under This Is China.
Couple years ago I used to hang out with the F&B manager at a Crowne Plaza...guy from Canada.
He told me they had so many problems just getting the idea through that the menu isn't supposed to be an optimistic guess of what they have.
Like it's supposed to be fucking embarassing for a restaurant to have to say oh sorry we don't have the calamari today. Sometimes you even get something off the bill for putting up with it.
All they gotta do is put the damn stickers over it saying unavailable if they don't have it.
The worst of that is if you try to go to a supposedly western restaurant in a smaller city. I guess they know that people who go there aren't really going to order the steak or fish so they don't need to have it in stock. It just looks good on the menu.
I had a recent discussion about this with my student / friend. In particular, it was about the cheap quality houses in China, but I applied the principle to everything here. She argued that they (consumers) have no choice but to buy what's available. Of course, my counter-argument was China doesn't understand real Capitalism. They have poor quality because they accept poor quality. Chinese people are so used to having things chosen for them or forced down their throats, they never thought of how powerful their individual buying decision is. If 400 million people refused to buy the cheap junk they sell as houses here, Capitalism would go to work and the developers would be forced to build something really worthy of the price.
As it is, nobody stands up and demands better. So the suppliers have no need to bother. And its like that for everything here. SinoSocialCapitalism is some kind of strange Frankenstein that wasn't really designed well.
RiriRiri:
Same discussion over salaries.
"Why do you earn X times more money?"
"Because I won't wake up for less."
xinyuren:
Two things the Chinese value over quality: Money and face. They don't know anything else. So Chinese priorities are different than in the West.
Eorthisio:
She obviously did not understand the concept of a consumer society, the consumer has the money, the consumer is king and should be able to get anything one wants. China did not too, the government keeps repeating that they want China to increase its domestic consumption up to 75% of the GDP, that represents only around 25% of the GDP right now, but they don't do much for this to happen by banning high quality foreign products and offering limited choice of crappy domestic products to their people.
Yes it is.
Case in point:
APEC Blue trend is going around, look it up. Beijing is holding the APEC meeting and has ordered the following:
- shut down of coal plants
- no delivery of milk and other items (to stop the put-put traffic)
- 6 days off from work (to lower traffic and thus pollution)
- heating (which usually kicks in on the 15) to be held back until AFTER the meeting
- telling people (and I have seen the warning) to not hang clothes or stick their heads out the window or they may be shot by snipers from various countries protecting their leaders
All of this just so Beijing can look good for a week and impress some world leaders for back patting and possibly investments. Chinese people are laughing about it now, laughing at their government. Then it is back to the crapper. Good old bait and switch. And I would walk out of KFC. My wife and I get picky when it comes to what we want... if you can't have it, we don't compromise.
Go to an ATM and withdraw 500RMB only to find out that 3 of the 100 RMB bills you receive are fake, walk into the bank and ask for assistance, they thank you for handing in the counterfeit bills and don't bother looking into reimbursing you even though you used their company's ATM machine.
Generally advertising in China has free hands to lie as much as possible.
To build on what Robk says. I doubt there has ever been an African leader who was invited to China to see any infrastructure project more than a few seconds after it was complete. "Come see out highway bridge, it's 7 months old and only partly collapsed"
There was something recently that people who are in commercials for products, e.g. what could be seen as celebrity enforcement, must be people who have actually tried the product.
It makes sense if you think of China as a cargo cult. Meaning, they can recognize the components of a functioning society, but not how they interlock and work. So they implement all kinds of good ideas in the most superficial way, and they rarely work because the ground work just isn't there. Or why they talk so much about harmony and prosperity, these are two things many prosperous countries have, if we say we have it then we will also be prosperous.
Put in another way:
A govt official will spend years learning about what kind of ingredients typically go into cakes, and compile an exhaustive list of every ingredient and what they taste like on their own. Then the official will present all of the other officials with a bowl full of whole unshelled eggs, raw flour, oil, milk, and sugar, all in unstirred heaps, and say 'look at my cake'! And everyone will agree that the cake is delicious because it has eggs, flour, oil, milk, and sugar in it. Then he will take in millions in Kickbacks and run to Vancouver.
expatlife26:
Oh totally cargo cult. Read a good article on how mao became obsessed with steel because the best countries all make lots of steel, therefore if china makes tons of steel theyre the best country. Ixo Fatso.
my students dont understand the power of the consumer, and they are shocked by my actions, as an example, i dont drink any coke or pepsi products, my way of protesting monopolistic practices they employ all over the world, so when a student offers me a bottle of water that has a coke or pepsi logo, i decline gracefully, my little boycott is nothing in the scheme of the world, but you have to start somewhere,
i actually try as a form of protest to buy brands that are not large corporate entities and give business to local brands, but rather than buy quality brand from a monopoly i just do without and buy nothing. most people are not as extreme as i am, i would not buy a coke in a desert dying of thirst and just die.
Scandinavian:
pepsi I can understand, but the nectar of Gods ?
Anyway, you are spot on. The Chinese consumers are sheep. And they are easily sold by promises products can never keep. Which is strange when the society is generally base on distrust.
But imagine if one day people realized that consumers have power. Citizens are sort of consumers of the state..... I am going to invest in an umbrella factory, because we know it will be a copy
Similar to Ambivalent above, I have my own 'protest'.
I don't do the 'demo' class thing for a school, pretending to work for them. Ads that ask for a foreign face to pretend to work at a place to get students in. If I work there, perhaps, but if I don't, never! I've made that point a few times, and turned down various offers...
Why?
Cos I hate having my time wasted too... by false advertising.
Yes, but our respective countries are bait-and-switch as well. Haven't we all encountered starry-eyed students who believe that our movies accurately reflect our cultures?
I went to buy some breakfast for my wife and i at McDs and was told they could not sell me individual Mc Muffins I had to buy a set.This was in Shenzhen.
In HongKong you can buy individual breakfast Items at McDs.Why not here in Shenzhen?
Hotwater:
Not come across that problem in GZ. Maybe they'd cooked an exact number of hash browns to match the breakfast burgers & didn't want any waste?
mike695ca:
yeah, they where screwing with you. You can buy individually. I have seen one where the sausage mcmuffin came with an orange juice, when i said i didnt want the orange juice they said it was the same price. But not exactly a scam as the price of the combo was the same price as just the individual sandwich.
I play a meiyou game with my wife when we go out to eat. If I ask for a menu item and they say, "meiyou" three consecutive times, I walk out, no questions asked by my wife. I really don't want to pay for fourth or fifth most desired dish.
