Sunday, March 8, 2009

Shopping in Beijing (#1)

beijing apartmentShopping for the Apartment
After living like a poor student in university housing, Veronica (and I) were THRILLED with our new Beijing apartment. If I didn't mention earlier, it is a 19th floor, 2 bedroom, 1 bath unit with wood floors and a few gigantic windows. I took the picture at left at night, and I think it captures the view pretty well. We are surrounded by other high rise apartment buildings for as far as the eyes can see. 

We are pretty much exactly between The Forbidden City (more on that later) and Tsinghua University. Luckily we are a 3 minute walk from a pretty good bus stop and a 15 minute walk from the best metro line (a center city loop). We are able to get pretty much wherever we want to go and have access to a wide variety of options for furnishing our apartment.

I should really start calling the apartment "the compound", because we live in a gated community. These are VERY common in Beijing. You can usually tell them from far away by their names written in large characters on the top of the buildings. Ours is made up of 9 buildings and contains:
a supermarket
a movie theater
a few restaurants
a news stand
a bank
a gym
and a beauty parlor.

Even better news: the supermarket stocks a wide variety of household wares. This was our first stop for setting up our apartment. The basics (dishes), extension cords, and some basic bedding was VERY reasonably priced and we are still amazed at how low the total is when we ring up at the cashier.

beijing ikea
When we realized how cheaply we could equip the flat with low quality merchandise, we decided to take it a step up: Ikea (宜家家居). And, believe it or not, Ikea is even less expensive in China. We were able to fit both bedrooms with quality bedding and stock the kitchen dish cabinets without breaking a sweat. The Ikea had Chinese signage, since Veronica and I have memorized the Ikea catalog, we got by on the Swedish (blorgens, klappnichts, pfaarns, etc).

Later I ventured out to Zhongguancun (中关村), a bargain-priced electronics mall for what I imagine was my first of many trips. I just needed to pick up a wifi router and a digital camera battery and since I had a few hours, I had fun haggling with people.

10x is a pretty standard mark up, especially for a white person, so I always opened with exactly one tenth of the starting price. People usually laughed at me, but since I only would go up in small intervals while they were coming down in much larger ones, I learned what the actual values were pretty quickly.

For example, the first price I was quoted for a Casio Exilm battery was 200元. I responded with 20元. The came down to 100元, I stayed at 20, they came down to 80元, I started to walk away. They came down to 50元, I offered 30元. They came down to 40元 and I walked away. After going to about 10 different vendors, and having all of them stop dropping the price at 40 - I finally bought the batter for 35元. I felt a little silly afterwards, when I realized that I wasted 30 minutes arguing over 5元 ($0.73).

The router was quite an experience, but not as much in the purchasing ($10 for 802.11g). The router's firmware was in Chinese. So the initial setup took about an hour. After I got connectivity, I managed to update the firmware to an english version and now everything works great. It was fun to realize that the battery retails for around $30 in the states ($20 online) and I paid $5.11. (The router retails for around $25 online.)

Ultimately, manufactured goods, depending on the quality seem to run anywhere from 10% - 50% of their cost in the US. The only exception is imported products made in Europe or America. These will definitely cost more. But why bother, when so much of the merchandise we buy in the states is made right here anyway!

I should really spend some more time talking about Zhongguancun. There really isn't ANYTHING like it in the US. I went to one of about six major markets in this small area. This market was contained in a 20+ story building, the first six floors of which were accessible by escalator and had open display areas where you could by pretty much any type of electronics you could imagine. The remaining 14 floors are storerooms and private shopping areas. I ended up in one of these rooms by accident (I was corralled there), but didn't end up purchasing anything. These rooms are where you go if you "know a guy" or if you are a foreigner about to get screwed.  More on Zhongguancun to come.