Wal-Mart in China
Today's mission was to find a PSP game store for Greyman. We had found a meager selection in a computer shopping mall in Xujiahui a couple of weeks ago but he clearly had hopes for something more substantial. First, we tried Shanghai's only Wal-Mart. It's not easy to get to. It's on the wrong side of the river, far from a subway, and in a residential area with nothing of interest in the neighborhood. The taxi ride was 40 rmb and the taxi driver had never heard of Wal-Mart.
This was the first two-story Wal-Mart I've ever been to. The groceries are on the first floor and the do-dads on the second. We were looking for the electronic do-dads section but when we found it there were no video game machines or games to be found. There were TVs, boom boxes, videos, etc - but no video games at all. It's the same way in all of the big department stores and retail stores in Shanghai. This is so odd that I am guessing there must be some regulation that prevents these stores from carrying video games. It's got to be some non-market reason - of which there are many in China.
I thought that the Wal-Mart here in China would, logically, be filled with cheap American goods. The ones in America are filled with cheap Chinese stuff afterall. But, much to my chagrin they also fill the ones in China with cheap Chinese goods. So we left and taxied back to downtown, had a pizza and continued our search in a computer mall near People's Park. There we hit pay dirt amid the chaos of the un-airconditioned three-story building packed with hawkers of everything from laptops to flashlights. We were offered cheap illegally-copied games but we bought the real stuff at a higher price. Mission accomplished.
To digress a bit - I once met with some of the Wal-Mart gnomes in Bentonville, Arkansas. They were having a problem sourcing American products for their overseas stores. Seems that foreigners going into a Wal-Mart store in, say - Europe, are expecting to find some American products inside. Problem was, Wal-Mart said they had a hard time finding American manufacturers that knew how to export. That may be true but I think the real problem was finding American manufacturers, period. It seems that a couple of decades of relentless Wal-Mart price pressures, combined with Wal-Mart's overseas sourcing, had already driven American manufacturers out of business. Wal-Mart was now reaping the rewards of their own greed.
Today's mission was to find a PSP game store for Greyman. We had found a meager selection in a computer shopping mall in Xujiahui a couple of weeks ago but he clearly had hopes for something more substantial. First, we tried Shanghai's only Wal-Mart. It's not easy to get to. It's on the wrong side of the river, far from a subway, and in a residential area with nothing of interest in the neighborhood. The taxi ride was 40 rmb and the taxi driver had never heard of Wal-Mart.
This was the first two-story Wal-Mart I've ever been to. The groceries are on the first floor and the do-dads on the second. We were looking for the electronic do-dads section but when we found it there were no video game machines or games to be found. There were TVs, boom boxes, videos, etc - but no video games at all. It's the same way in all of the big department stores and retail stores in Shanghai. This is so odd that I am guessing there must be some regulation that prevents these stores from carrying video games. It's got to be some non-market reason - of which there are many in China.
I thought that the Wal-Mart here in China would, logically, be filled with cheap American goods. The ones in America are filled with cheap Chinese stuff afterall. But, much to my chagrin they also fill the ones in China with cheap Chinese goods. So we left and taxied back to downtown, had a pizza and continued our search in a computer mall near People's Park. There we hit pay dirt amid the chaos of the un-airconditioned three-story building packed with hawkers of everything from laptops to flashlights. We were offered cheap illegally-copied games but we bought the real stuff at a higher price. Mission accomplished.
To digress a bit - I once met with some of the Wal-Mart gnomes in Bentonville, Arkansas. They were having a problem sourcing American products for their overseas stores. Seems that foreigners going into a Wal-Mart store in, say - Europe, are expecting to find some American products inside. Problem was, Wal-Mart said they had a hard time finding American manufacturers that knew how to export. That may be true but I think the real problem was finding American manufacturers, period. It seems that a couple of decades of relentless Wal-Mart price pressures, combined with Wal-Mart's overseas sourcing, had already driven American manufacturers out of business. Wal-Mart was now reaping the rewards of their own greed.
posted by Kevcham at 8:10 AM
1 Comments:
Is this where the stores have gone to since the market was closed?
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