A question of distinctionsOnce inst

A question of distinctions
Once installed at the Ice Day counter, I quickly encountered the blurred
boundaries that had produced a crisis of trust in the store. One of my first
surprises at Harbin No. X was the frequency with which customers hoped,
even expected, to negotiate prices with sales clerks. ‘
Dazhe ma?
’ ‘Is there a
discount?’, customer after customer would ask.
Prices at Harbin No. X were, however,
not
negotiable, and the store
continued to sell goods only at the prices marked on official price tags. But
given the prevalence of bargaining in other retail settings – not only low-
end
geti
settings but even new, high-end department stores – shoppers were
loath to relinquish price haggling. They often refused to believe sales clerks’
insistence on printed prices. In one case, when I told a pair of customers
there was no discount, they simply asked me a second time, as if I had not
already responded to their question. One man was so astonished that there
was no price haggling at Harbin No. X that he exclaimed, ‘But now that
we have a market economy (
shichang jingji
), things have changed. What
do you mean I can’t bargain (
jiangjia
)?’
Indeed, given the workings of the market economy, the skeptical shopper
never took a price at face value, fearing he would miss out on a discount
by not pushing hard enough. When Big Sister Lin quoted a 300 yuan price
to a customer, he responded, ‘How about 280?’ ‘I’m telling you the truth’,
Lin replied plaintively. ‘I can’t bargain, not even one penny. This is the
lowest price, any lower and we don’t earn anything!’ The man did not make
the purchase. In another instance, after I refused to offer a discount, a
woman customer leaned over and asked in an undertone if it was possible
to ‘speak to the manager’ about a discount. Many customers seemed
convinced that, if they just asked in the right way, a discount would be
forthcoming.
Over time, I came to realize that the problem was one of distinguishing
among retail settings. This was revealed to me one day when, after I
declined to offer a discount, a woman customer asked me, ‘Is this counter
Harbin No. X’s?’
‘What?’ I replied, confused.
‘Are you an individually-operated (
geren
) counter, or . . .’
I understood. ‘We are factory-direct sales (
changjia zhixiao
)’, I chirped,
indicating that the counter was not a
geti
operation. ‘We can’t bargain.’
3
Such confusion meant that, in the eyes of most shoppers, Harbin No. X
was not significantly different from a
geti
merchant, and this drastically
eroded much of the symbolic capital Harbin No. X might have claimed as
a large, state-run retailer in pre-reform days and through the early years of
economic reforms. Despite the fact that store managers insisted to me that
simply by entering the store, ‘customers express their trust in Harbin No.
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X’, in fact most shoppers had little confidence that Harbin No. X or its
sales clerks operated according to anything but the short-term, profit-driven
motives that now seemed to define all retail settings in the city.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that it was an elderly couple (the elderly
being a group rarely found in newer retail settings), stopping at the Ice Day
counter for a brief look, who continued to recognize Harbin No. X as a
traditional, fixed-price retailer. The old man made a comment to his wife
about bargaining, to which she exclaimed, ‘This is a state store (
gongjia
)!
You can’t bargain here!’ Our assistant floor manager, Manager Zhou, had
been standing at the counter, and upon hearing this she beamed at me and
then said to them, ‘That’s right, but
we
guarantee the quality of our goods.’
Strategies of the skeptical shopper
Harbin No. X’s promise of quality goods (backed by a return policy) was
not one that customers regarded with confidence, however. The store’s
customers were skeptical shoppers, and their purchasing strategies clearly
revealed this. By importing shopping strategies refined in
geti
markets into
the state-owned department store, customers also demonstrated the
blurring, in their minds, between retail settings like Harbin No. X and its
private competitors.
Two of the most common risk-reducing shopping practices were the close
inspection of merchandise and a practice called ‘
tiao
’ in Chinese, a term
that literally means ‘to choose’ and in practice refers to selecting the best
from a number of ostensibly identical items. Both close inspections and
tiao
were practices I would later see regularly exercised in a
geti
clothing bazaar
I also studied, unsurprising given that these strategies reduced the risk of
buying shoddy merchandise. In fact, I found that shoppers at Harbin No.
X were often more insistent upon these two strategies than were shoppers
in
geti
markets – a situation which partly reflects the greater expense of the
down coats I sold at Harbin No. X (about 300 yuan, roughly US$35)
relative to the jeans, shirts, and blouses sold in
geti
clothing bazaars (40 to
100 yuan, about US$5–12). (In 2000, the average monthly wage in Harbin
was 580 yuan.) By contrast, at the high-end department store I studied,
customers focused much more on ‘discounts’ than on merchandise quality.
So whereas bargaining has become common practice in most Chinese retail
settings, close inspections and
tiao
remain more class-bounded shopping
strategies and were amplified by the relative costliness of purchases I
observed at Harbin No. X.
Careful inspection of merchandise was the first line of defense against
being tricked into buying the low-quality goods that filled
geti
markets.
Shoppers at Harbin No. X would regularly examine every seam, carefully
experiment with each zipper, and closely scrutinize collars and cuffs. One