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Published: August 21st 2008
Our first trip into the city of Beijing
Ok...so we decided we needed to go buy cameras and do some sight seeing. We felt really adventurous so we decided to take the subway. The first line, line 10, was new, clean, and really modern. This took us down to the electronics mart. It was a pretty big store that housed too many vendors to count. And this was where the fun begins. We were told never pay full price so we were ready to barter. I felt that since almost everything is made in china we could get pretty good deals. But buyer beware you have to understand the conversion from dollars to RMB's or Yuan’s. This is further complicated by the fact that the bank gives 6.189 RMB's to a dollar and the vendors say they do a 6.8 RMB to the dollar conversion. I am still not sure which is right.
Anyway we got into the mart and were immediately greeted by an interpreter, I don't know how he knew we weren’t from there? I told him we wanted to look at canon cameras and he took us to the main booth, we found a model number
and asked for a price, which was way too high. We asked to turn it but we had to go to another booth to actually look at the camera and negotiate a price. We got to the other booth and we figured out how much we wanted to pay and skillfully worked the price for the camera down to that level but, we were not done yet. They next asked us if we needed re-chargeable batteries which we said no, especially since we get batteries for free at work. But he didn’t stop there, the next item was a memory card, he offered 2, 4, or 8 gig models. We figured we needed a 4 gig model and proceeded to re-negotiate a price for the camera and memory card. This took approximately 30 minutes and by then I was getting tired of the process and I am sure they could have gone on much longer so we agreed on what we thought was a good price. So we went to pay, they brought the goods and the salesman took our cameras and hastily put our memory cards in for us as well as the supplied batteries that were in the
box. This is an important thing right here, it was like being with a magician, remember this.
We were happy and we started taking pictures immediately.
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Joe Cuviello
non-member comment
It only Makes Sense...
Everything in Wal-Mart is made in China, so it is only logical that they simply need to hang a Wal-Mart sign on the door to have one there. So here is the proof that everytime any of us buy's something from Wal-Mart, the money goes straight to China and the profit goes to the Wallace family...aka, the greediest rich people on the planet.