Death by salesman

You never know what’s going to happen next around here.

On Saturday, we were just getting ready to go out when there was a ring at the doorbell. The screen on our video entry phone (on of the many ridiculous and quite unnecessary mod cons with which our flat is equipped) showed the peaked cap of one of the security guards, peering over a large package. Behind him another figure could be seen, apparently carrying a large pile of boxes.

Mystified, as we weren’t expecting any kind of delivery, Peter let him in. On arrival at the door he profferred one of the boxes and launched into an explanation.

‘Sorry’, said Peter in Chinese, ‘I don’t speak Chinese’.

Ignoring this (as they usually do), the guard continued handing over the package. He showed a list with all the flat numbers, several of which had signatures next to them. It became apparent we too were meant to sign for our box. There was much smiling and joviality. This, it seemed, was a free New Year gift for each flat, from whom we know not, but Peter signed and thanked him and off he went, quite happy.

What do you think it was? Drink? Hardly likely. Sweets? Sadly not. It was – and you’ll all be sorry you’re missing out, I’m sure – ‘Quick Frozen Glutinous Corn’. In other words, corn on the cob. At least 10 of them, loose, in a box. Every home should have one – and if you live here, it seems every home will bloomin’ well get one, whether it likes it or not.

Anyway, having started thus, our day proceeded to get weirder and weirder. We’d decided to go to the main shopping area in the city centre where there are three shopping centres side by side which we’d not visited before. Peter was keen to try and buy some shoes which would serve for wearing in the office and walking there in the snow, rather than having to change into his walking boots twice a day or risk a tumble on the ice.

The shopping centre (we only got to one) proved to be much like every other one we’ve seen in China, namely huge, glitzy, overpriced, and following an identical layout: basement – supermarket; ground floor – jewellery and cosmetics; first floor – men’s clothes; second & third floors – women’s clothes; fourth floor – household goods. Sometimes they have the same pattern but are all on one floor, in which case they replicate the thing horizontally, as it were, in huge long aisles stretching further than the eye can see. I’m not sure who these malls are designed for. Most of the goods are way outside the price range of the majority of ordinary Chinese people so they are quite often virtually empty, but in cold weather people seem to gather there as a social event, and wander around quite happily just looking at things.

Last Saturday – being the Chinese equivalent of the last shopping weekend before Christmas, I suppose – was an exception. I wouldn’t quite describe it as a retail frenzy on a British scale, but the place was heaving and people were definitely buying. There was a festive atmosphere and some live traditional music by the Clinique counter.

Shopping in China is a Trial. When you buy something in these places, it’s a huge palaver. You get take your item to the counter and they ring it through, but then they keep the item and instead give you a bill, which you have to take to a separate cash desk, not necessarily nearby. There, having used your specially sharpened elbows to fight off would-be queue-jumpers, you pay, and get a receipt which you then take back to the original desk to retrieve your purchase. If you then also want a fa piao (see earlier post if you're one of the few people on the planet, it seems, who doesn't now know what a fa piao is!), you generally have to go to yet another desk – usually miles away in an obscure corner of the shop – and queue/jostle again to present your receipt and tell them what to enter into their fa piao computer. (We now have this down to a fine art, by the way, ever since Kevin provided us with a magic piece of paper with all the requisite details written on in Chinese.)

But it’s not just this, or the language barrier, or the different sizes, or not being able to recognise the products half the time. It’s the fact that they WILL NOT leave you alone. The minute you walk into any shop, at least one assistant will immediately leap up, greet you and proceed to follow close behind you as you move around the shop, so that it’s impossible to look at anything. If you do linger over an item for more than a millisecond, he or she will start telling you about it. Protestations that you don’t speak Chinese, or even blanking them completely, have little or no effect. They may hesitate for a fraction of a second, but will then resume as though programmed.

If by any chance they do speak English and you ask them nicely (or even not nicely) to go away and leave you alone so that you can look, they merely laugh and carry on. We once spent about 10 minutes trying to explain to the girl in a Beijing hotel shop that she’d be far more likely to make a sale to a westerner if they were left in peace to look around, but it simply did not compute. Even in the supermarket they employ staff as what we call ‘pointless pointers’, whose job is to stand in front of the shelves and point to the most expensive item in their section while giving you a sales pitch. Maybe it’s just a British thing, but it makes me want to SCREAM!

The trick (if there is one) seems to be that if you really don’t want to buy, you have to get out fast. If they sense the slightest hint that you are genuinely interested in making a purchase, they get the bit between their teeth and won’t let go. Sometimes this works to their own disadvantage, such as the woman in the same Beijing hotel who was convinced we wanted to buy jade name-stamps with our Chinese zodiac sign on the top and our names specially engraved on the bottom. We liked them, but the price she was asking was astronomical so we changed our minds. She pursued us for two days, finally going to the lengths of engraving our names on for us so that she was then obliged to sell them to us at whatever price we named.

I tell you, the whole experience is so infuriating I’ve more or less given up shopping - which for me is like going into rehab.

So there’s Peter, trying on shoes. Unfortunately he didn’t know his Chinese size, but after a bit of trial and error we ascertained he was a 260 (the approximate length of the foot in millimetres, in case you’re interested – much more sensible than our system). As it was busy, we’d managed to look at several and narrow it down without attracting the attention of the staff, but when it came to the point of asking for the left shoe there was nothing else for it. There were several girl assistants, dressed in smart uniforms with fab red and gold waistcoats, but our case was taken up by a chap whom we’d at first mistaken for a customer, as he was wearing only scruffy jeans and a bomber jacket, with no official badges or markings. However, as he seemed to be telling the girls what to do and they seemed not to object, we had to assume he did indeed belong to the store.

Peter tried on lots of pairs of shoes but none was suitable. When he finally found a pair he did like, they only had them in brown, and he wanted black. This all took some time; you know how it is. Chap in Jeans was highly attentive, but eventually he began to lose patience. He started persuading Peter to try on other pairs in size 255 or 265. Enthusiastic nodding greeted his protests that they were too small or large. Shoe Man kept producing brown ones. It took ages to get the message through that it was black or nothing, but when it did, this was clearly too much. He pointed angrily at Peter’s own shoes, which were brown, as if to say ‘Well, brown ones were obviously good enough for you before, so what’s wrong with mine?’, and started pulling black shoes off the shelf at random and virtually forcing Peter to try them on, irrespective of style or size. He seemed to be at his wits’ end.

After quite a lot of this, I suggested to Peter that maybe today just wasn’t his day on the shoe front, and that maybe we should go and look around the rest of the shopping centre before we actually died. He agreed, and thanking our friend profusely for his help, we set off. But Shoe Guy wasn’t taking No for an answer and began following us. We quickened our pace, and even hid behind some shirts, but as we were about to make our escape upstairs he cornered us at the bottom of the escalator and, grinning, beckoned Peter into what I took to be a stockroom through a concealed entrance at the back of a small shop.

A minute or so later, Peter re-emerged and called me. ‘You’ve got to see this,’ he said. Following him and the Shoe Guy, I stepped through the back of the shop – into a (literally) parallel universe. Attached to the shopping centre we were in, stretching away into darkness, was another narrow corridor of shops running alongside, but where ours were huge and brightly lit, these were poky and dark, with things hanging from the ceiling. Every single shop seemed to sell shoes. There was no obvious entrance or exit other than that which we had used, but customers were milling about as if oblivious to the 21st century going on next door. It was straight out of Harry Potter.

Peter was ushered into one of the little stalls, where our pal and several girls again attempted to bully him into trying on every pair of black shoes they had, becoming quite agitated when he argued that they weren’t his size. Finally I managed to bundle him out and get back onto our own side of the time portal, but our stalker could still be seen hanging about for quite a while, watching us as we walked around, and about an hour later he materialised beside us yet again, several floors up, and seemed to be saying that he had just two more pairs for Peter to try on if he would only come back downstairs. I half expected to see him chasing after our taxi, brandishing black shoes, as we drove home.

Maybe the ski shops of Edinburgh should take a leaf out of this guy’s book.