China - Day 10

We started the morning by driving to a Caterpillar plant that was also located in “Shanghai” (so about an hour drive).  Caterpillar is a new partner company of the LGO program so it was exciting to see one of their facilities.  We started the day with a Q&A with the plant manager who had quite a bit of experience as an Ex-pat in China, so that was an interesting perspective to get.  Next we toured the factory and overall the tour and facility were quite impressive.  I should be impressed with the size of the work they were doing but when you’ve seen a Boeing airplane rolling down an assembly line, it is really hard to top that. ;-)  The most surprising/interesting thing was the workforce there.  Most of the workers I saw were young (Caterpillar discussed their strategy of hiring young people out of technical school and supplying additional training) but I was even MORE surprised by the number of women we saw working in the factory.  From what we saw in the car facility the day before (and the discussion we had after that with the CLFMs about women in the heavy manual labor workforce in China) I get the impression that what Caterpillar has is pretty unique.

After we got back to the hotel I went with a group to the general shopping market that is underground and mixed into a subway station.  You could buy any and everything here from golf clubs to remote control cars to shoes and clothes.  This was the stereotypical market with people yelling broken English at you as you walk by to try to get you into their store.  Just about every store there had a duplicate store within a couple of booths so it was very easy to compare prices and try to get the best deal.  You just walk into a store and play the game where you go back and forth on prices.  The throw out the little English they have like “good quality” and “special price” and then you type numbers into a calculator.  Typically you can walk away with an item for 1/5 or even 1/7 of where they start.  A good place to start you opening bid is 1/10 of what they type in, mostly because it is easy math, and of course this is followed by ridiculous faces and exclamations of “impossible”.  The next big key is to not give up a ton of money on the first one to two exchanges.  The other key is to always start walking away after 2+ rounds.  Then you get the “name your price” and “final offer” prices (which of course are never final).  Usually they chase you down in the aisle (where you are being yelled at to enter an identical store) with a moderately low number in the calculator.  At this point it becomes a game of how much you are willing to pay.  I saw a number of occurrences when they would not come down, even 5 Rambos, from their calculator in the aisle price (and sometimes you get an F-you as they walk back to their store) but I also saw people take off another 20% from that price.  I feel like after you get a couple of store “chase you down” price you can maybe get 90% of that price, but not always.

In the end I bought a pair of shoes and grossly overpaid for them (despite the fact that I have all of these great observations from numerous transactions of people in my group).  When I finally saw something I wanted I was a bit time constrained and really I gave up $15 just because I was tired of haggling.  I paid for the convenience of my time. :-)  Either way I did better than in the US and it was fun to argue with this girl in broken English.

One other interesting thing to note is the way the people in the store will run off to another booth if they don’t have what you need.  For example, when I saw the shoes that I wanted they did not have my size so the girl’s sister ran off to another store (and I saw this numerous times because these were small shops with very little room for inventory).  First she came back with a pair in a different color to confirm my size and then she went off again to find the same size in the right color.  I am curious (and I have no idea which it is) if the store that I am dealing with a) bought those shoes from another store, b) shares inventory with another store, c) agrees to give the other store a cut of what they made off of me, or d) some other arrangement that I have not thought of.  It would be interesting to know because if they bought the inventory from another store I, the buyer, would have much more bargaining power because they do NOT want to carry that inventory.  It is all fun to watch and think about.  As someone in business school who often talk about running people selling widgets and all of the financial workings of the business, it would be really cool to get the actual number from this store (how much did my shoes really cost?).

After the shopping, we met up with the CLFM and LGO students for dinner and karaoke.  The party started a little slow because people were eating so myself and a few other individuals had to supply the singing (I subscribe to the philosophy that if you can’t sing good, sing loud).  It was funny for a while because there was a large group of CLFM student there in the beginning so we went back and forth between English and Chinese songs and when each group had their song on the classmates would sing along and the other group would kind of stand there (because they had NEVER heard that song before).

Eventually we transition from beers to shots and things went how so many LGO parties go.  Downhill fast! ;-)

Eventually the CLFM students trickled off (except for 5 hard-core party-ers…and to be fair to them, many have families at home and have schoolwork due later this week) and the LGOs took over the song list.  We got kicked out of the big party room so we transitioned to a smaller room.  As the pictures and videos (coming soon once I get better internet) show, a good time was had by all.