Back from Shanghai
So I we were out shopping, and she was looking at some imitation bags, and I noticed sitting there a few ipod shuffles (the tiny tie-clip ipod) and they were in new apple boxes, and I was pretty surprised that they even had customers for such things. The export-only oriented factory is indeed in china, so hey. I had the store let me listen to it playing music, and after laughing at their iniital price of 3x japan retail, I explained that it was silly for me to pay any more than 50% of retail, when retail for the same item includes oh, a receipt and a warranty. So I take it home and plug it in and look closer, and actually, it is an AMAZING fake. Looks totally real, even plays mp3 files. But it is actually just a flash memory mp3 (not aac compatible) player that looks and feels 99% like a real 2nd generation shuffle. It cannot sync with iTunes, and it copies files very slowly. But other than that it is damned hard to notice that it is not real.
Of course an economist would say that if I still want one, retail is a decent price, and I should not think of the price as retail plus the 50% retail I already paid, but that is what it feels like when it was an impulse buy that I barely need. Foolish me.
I wonder if the guy selling it even knows it is fake, let alone what he is selling, considering his initial completely insane asking price of about $300.
Will wrote:
His initial asking price sounds pretty sane to me. He obviously faces almost no negative consequences from asking too high considering you ended up buying it anyway, instead of saying “fuck you for trying to swindle me, I’m not going to do business with you no matter what your price now” and walking away. So why not take a chance and start high? The odds of getting dumb foreigners to pay at least $150 (with the foreigners walking away patting themselves on the back for being able to negotiate the price down so far!) are high enough that it makes them a lot more in the long run.
Or did you just mean insane from the point of view of the buyer?
Posted on 22-May-07 at 4:54 am | Permalink
Seth wrote:
Bargaining is an art, and starting with an initial crazy bid is one tactic. But imagine the fake brand bags that were sitting next to what I thought was a real ipod.
For these bags, they are acutely aware of the actual retail prices, and their opening bids are always a fraction of the actual retail. Depending on the quality of the fakes, it seems their initial bid can go upwards of half of retail. But here we have someone starting out on a supposedly real good, at triple retail. This suggests to me that they actually dont even know what they are selling. Each time they returned with bizarre prices in the 2.5-2.8x range. I finally had to just say look have fun, I am sure you will sell it to someone, and I left. At that point of course they came running out and agreed.
Their first bid was 3x retail. I then explained, in english and japanese, in terms that they nodded and said they understood, that the japan retail price is way lower than their initial asking price. At least three times they then said “ok ok ok ok” and then asked again for like 2.8x retail. I then repeated to explain what RETAIL is, since they clearly didn’t know.
They still got the last laugh, since they were selling a $1 fake.
Posted on 22-May-07 at 1:33 pm | Permalink