Consumption and shopping
I won’t get into the “high-end” angles of goods and trade, only the most general angle, the one you most easily “bump into” in everyone’s daily life. The supermarket system in the US is split out by category, by need: food, fashion, furniture, electronics, home appliances, computers, office supplies, alcoholic beverages, pet supplies…
Generally, no consumer segment is left empty, nor left un-professionalized. The first time you set foot in a supermarket in the US, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed, because of how spacious and vast it is, with its goods stacked layer upon layer. Most consumer supermarkets are open 24/7, seven days a week, including holidays. They don’t close as much as supermarkets in Europe.
With ordinary consumer goods, Americans have almost no concept of… repair. For example, a huge refrigerator is used only from the moment it’s bought until the first time its gas runs out; no one thinks about recharging the gas a second time to keep using it – they immediately swap in a new one.
So the US also has a chain of stores that specialize in… taking in all kinds of used items and reselling them very cheaply, for people who need them. Every family always has a corner of the garage for storing used things, especially clothes, shoes, household goods… and every few months, people open up and put out a garage sale sign.
Here you can buy brand-new bicycles for a handful of dollars, table-and-chair sets for a few percent of the original price… Whatever is still left after the garage sale, they box up to give away, and charity workers will come right to the house, load it onto a truck, and haul it to the used-goods superstore chain. The customers of used-goods superstores aren’t necessarily poor people.
PLENTY OF PEOPLE WITH DECENT INCOMES STILL KEEP THE HABIT OF WANDERING THE USED-GOODS MARKETS, PICKING UP A FEW QUIRKY THINGS…
Besides the pleasure of strolling and shopping at the malls, America’s e-commerce system – buying online – is gradually overtaking the traditional way. Especially before the holiday seasons, delivery trucks swarm along every road. Delivery workers just quietly come to your door, leave the package you ordered on the doorstep – from electronics to clothing – and then… move on.
No signature, no inspection, and also… no fear of theft. Many families are out all day, and when they come home at night they find the packages they ordered piled up by the door. I’ve also heard whispers that thefts have happened, but they’re very rare. So I haven’t heard anyone mention how you’d be compensated if a package goes missing. But businesses usually don’t push the loss onto the customer. It’s all based entirely on mutual trust.
There’s a quintessentially American shopping convention, common nationwide: you have the right to return an item you bought within a few weeks, maybe up to a few months, or even a few years… depending on the supermarket chain’s policy. There’s no annoyed reaction at all if you carry the item you bought back to the store and hand it to the returns clerk – with the receipt from your purchase, of course. At most, they’ll ask you a single question, meant more to take good care of the customer than to give you a hard time: Why are you returning this item? You have every right to answer: I don’t like it. And the clerk will still accept it, and say thank you! Because of this way of shopping, some people have taken advantage of it.
“Buying” items they only need to use once, then returning them the next day. For example, say tomorrow your family is going on a picnic and you need a few tents, some umbrellas, a few chairs, a handful of floats, even a boat, bicycles… You go to the store, haul them home, and once the outing is over you bring them back. 100% refund! Or you’re going to a party and want a nice dress – you “play the same game.” There have been anecdotes and newspaper articles about all sorts of bizarre returns.
For example, buying a few pots of ornamental flowers, displaying them until they wilt, or planting them in the ground where they shrivel and die, and then bringing the dead plants back to return. Or buying food, letting it spoil at home, and returning that too… In cases like these the seller can refuse to take them back.
However, in a society where people hold self-respect and “playing fair” in high regard, the share of people who “play dirty” isn’t high and doesn’t give retailers much of a headache to balance out, so this shopping rule has been kept up all along, as something perfectly normal all across the US.
Customers in the US are both kings served from head to toe and… silent victims and debtors. The banks are very… eager to get people to spend money, by… lending “without mercy.” An immigrant who’s only been here a few months will already have them “toss” one to several thousand dollars of credit onto a card for them: Just go ahead and spend, the more the better, the more your credit goes up, and we’ll deduct the debt at the end of the month… But if you… lose your head, lacking the experience to keep it in check, you may well end up tossing a few pairs of designer shoes into… the soup pot and cooking them up for the whole family to eat all month, instead of putting in vegetables and meat.
That said, apart from people who spend money far too lavishly, there really aren’t all that many who go bankrupt over a shopping obsession. Because prices in general, from a bunch of vegetables to a car, are very cheap relative to people’s income. Even far cheaper than the price of that same item back in Vietnam. So for new immigrants, dressing yourself, or buying the most basic consumer goods, is almost nothing to worry about.
In the city where I live, there’s a chain of supermarkets specializing in Vietnamese and Asian goods, scattered in all four directions. Other ethnic communities all have similar store chains. Almost any immigrant, in any area, can shop within their own specialized supermarket chain. Rest assured, as much as 99% of whatever you can find in Vietnam is available there. From toothpicks and flip-flops to bottles of soy sauce and jars of fish sauce…
However, one thing saddens me deeply: a great many distinctly Vietnamese products – such as shrimp paste, Phu Quoc fish sauce, the ingredients for pho, mi Quang, bun bo Hue… – clearly have Vietnamese printed on the packaging, yet are made in Thailand, China… by those countries’ own companies. Are our home-country businesses too weak to compete, or have they… forgotten this market of millions of overseas Vietnamese?
Trading in "hand-carried" goods
Beyond the things mentioned above, the American market has one more defining feature: shopping by timing. The same pair of shoes, the same watch, the same handbag… sells for $100 one day, “out of nowhere” drops to $10 the next, and the day after goes back up to $100 as before. The reason for a markdown might be stock brought in for the holidays: once the holiday passes, the price instantly becomes… scarily cheap.
Or, come spring and summer, fall-and-winter merchandise gets marked down. Or there’s merchandise tied to a movie, a sporting event… Another reason: supermarkets often reel customers in with the trick of suddenly discounting a few items for a couple of days, so people drop by to buy one thing and then… want to come back for more. Those who make a living hunting goods and trading between the two shores of the US and Vietnam are extremely good at “hunting” for stock and items like these.
That said, even for items that aren’t on sale, there are many categories of goods whose prices in the US are far cheaper than in Vietnam. For example, a men’s dress shirt for office workers in Vietnam, from a fairly decent brand, might cost 600,000–700,000 VND. But for a shirt of the same brand tier, or even higher-end, bought in the US and shipped back to Vietnam, the resale price can be a few hundred thousand dong lower.
In particular, America’s fashion and consumer shopping season runs from Halloween, through Thanksgiving, all the way to the end of Christmas and New Year’s Day. After New Year’s Day, all the clothing, candies and sweets – basically everything, across the board – get marked down, even though their shelf life is still very long and their quality is intact. That same stretch is the… Tet-shopping season in Vietnam. Many “savvy” people only have to “work” the clothing and candy lines alone, shipping them home to sell for the Tet season, and they… sell out like wildfire!
That’s why, back when we were still in Vietnam, since we had relatives in the US, my wife did online selling for a long time. A group of friends who love shopping, or who do this same work, hung out together online. They could send a link to an item they’d hunted down online, my wife would forward that link to family in the US to order, and it would be shipped back to Vietnam in a short time. Or my wife would pick out the styles she liked, post them on her page, and whenever someone ordered, or wanted to resell as a middleman, she’d have the goods shipped over.
In general, a lot of people in Vietnam these days are pretty well versed in this… The sellers split the profits among one another. The buyers, meanwhile, can find plenty of items they like at prices much cheaper than buying at the malls or at domestic shop chains. There have been efforts on the government’s part to regulate this trading system for taxes. But when you think about it, it’s just like Uber Taxi: when the benefit lies more with the customer, “sorting it out” is a struggle indeed!
Writing to this point, I suddenly feel like… giving up painting and journalism to go sell things online!
