Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

Bargain Hunting - Beijing Style

Bargaining is almost considered sports in China.  It is also very common in the Middle East, but frankly, China is nothing like the Mideast when it comes to bargaining.  When I first arrived here, I knew nothing about the bargaining practices in Beijing.  I asked for the price, I was told what it was, and I had to decide whether what I wanted to buy was worth the price or not.  Very quickly I realized that it never was.  The initial prices quoted were so outrageous, that I started to think, maybe the cost of living here is not that low after all....  (I am not new to bargaining, but in other places, the sellers usually start at a price which was much closer to the real value of the product than here in Beijing).  Let me give you an example.  Suppose you want to buy a silk scarf.  Now you know from your friends, and based on the fact that you bought one last week, that the going price is roughly RMB 30.00 (for the sake of the example).  You figure that below 20.00 is cheap, and over 100.00 is highway robbery.  So you stop at a booth, at the silk market for example, and the guy says: "good price for you, my friend, 200.00 quay".  If you are like me, and you're used to offering half to start the bargaining process, you lose.  So how do you come up with a counter offer?  My wife made it a science.  She actually looks at the merchandise first, then she has an internal discussion with herself, and she comes up with what it will be worth for her.  Then she asks for the price.  Regardless of the answer, her counteroffer is precisely what she has decided it's worth it for her.  And she does not move from that price.  Surprisingly, her rate of success is excellent, even when her offer is 10% (I have seen less) of the original price.  Sometimes she even gets a better price when she states that she wants to buy more than one.  The sad part is that almost always we see the same product for less(!) or we meet someone who claims (I never believe them) that they bought it for less.  It's fun bargaining, it's fun shopping here in Beijing.  If you happen to be here, do not miss the Dirt Market (panjiayuan).  Here are some pictures I took at Panjiayuan: panjiayuan1, panjiayuan2, panjiayuan3.

A colleague forwarded the following article to me.  It's title: "Microsoft Makes Claim on Linux Code" struck a chord.  In short, Microsoft's CEO has said that "every user of the open source Linux system could owe his company money for using its intellectual property".  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/20/microsoft_claims_linux_code/.  This article covers a deal between Microsoft and Novell, owner of the SUSE distribution of Linux.  Apparently, the article suggests that Red Hat refused to sign a similar deal with Microsoft.  Will that be the end of it?  Will Microsoft pursue Red Hat or its users for patent infringement?  It will be extremely interesting to see how this plays out.  In any case, it seems that if I was in the market for an Open Source operating system, I would have to go with Solaris.  Sun has plenty of intellectual property in Solaris.  However, Sun used the CDDL open source license to release Solaris along with more than 1,600 active Sun patents which are associated with the Solaris OS.

Posted at 12:43PM Nov 21, 2006 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[2]