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Smart Mob in China for Retailer Discount
taweili writes "The Economist has a story about Tuangou in China. Tuangou, roughly translated into group purchasing, is basically a smart mob who arrange the meet up over the internet and show up at a retailer at a specific time and use their number to negotiate a discount with the retailer. In the story, a Tuangou group of 500 show up in Gomei (largest home electronic retailer in China) at 4pm on June 16th and negotiate a 10 ~ 30% discount for the group. Gomei not only closed the door to the normal customers but also prepared goody bags for these Tuangou shoppers. Now, that's Power to the People!"
If you got a couple hundred people to go down to your local Best Buy, they'd probably call the cops. Even if they didn't, the iron-fisted corporate policies of most retailers would probably preclude getting any kind of deal.
Sounds interesting but what if you don't get the discount you want? Or maybe the reatiler doesn't gove you a discount at all?
Potentially you just wasted a byunch of peoples time, and probably a lot of the people who showed up would buy without the discount anyways since they are already there cash in hand.
Of course that would be the last time that particular retailer was approached.
In the car tuning scene "group buys" have been commion for years, though they generally don't involve people personally showing up anywhere or have anywhere close to this scale.
I must be tired I saw body bags instead of goody bags that would be some hardcore negotiations.
TheADDkid.com
Actually, "power to the mob" may be a better description. Mob based power has existed throughout history, and it usually has not been pretty. Furthermore, if you're an individual (in the true sense of the term) who does not enjoy associating with the mob, you tend to be screwed over by those who do. Food for thought.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
No one here disagrees that Tuangou is really a good idea. But due to the way market works, if this trend catches on nationwide, soon there will be a slowly increase in prices, so that the discount they ask for will result in the current prices of today. Buying outside a Tuangou will become quite more expensive and impracticable.
Please, correct me if I am wrong.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
All we ever got from our flashmobs in NYC was blowing the "terrorized" mindset with an edgy kumbayah. Meanwhile, Chinese get bargains. Who are capitalists, and who are the brainwashed masses?
--
make install -not war
Best Buy Invaded By Blue Shirt Improv Artists
Paid Q&A/Research
Using a mob to threaten a retailer? must be highly illegal.
http://www.uncoverip.com/
Although I agree with ClamIAm, who said "I don't think this would work in the US", I also believe some non-chain retailers would be amiable to volume discounts if asked beforehand.
If and only if you manage to find such retailers.
If they have the inventory.
On, second though, I live in Norway where everything is ridioilously expensive. so the I think the answer is something like 'Spend all winter getting drunk wondering why there's only 2-3 hours between sunset and dawn, and subsequently spend all summer being happy and getting drunk while being mildly amusing at the strange shiny thing in the middle of the sky which never seem to disappear..'
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
What are the major differences between short-lived mobs such as these and more permanent mobs such as Cosa Nostra and Yakuza? Can a mob of fair users overpower the MAFIAA?
Who wants to mob up on an NYC Apple store to see if they're give us a massive discount? Please leave stones at home since we don't want to break the glass house.
I wouldn't walk across the street for a 10% discount. If you time your purchases correctly, the major chains have sales that save you 25 to 50%. Never mind getting a thousand of your best friends together; just wait until they want to get rid of the old merchandise to make way for the new.
These Chinese should take lessons from my sister. It seems to me that shopping has been refined to a fine art in America.
but mob shopping is old news in brasil. usually it involves closelly related ppl, like a large familly or employees of the same company banding togheter to buy goods in bulk.
the most common itens are "back to school" goods, such as notepads, pens and stuff like that.
What ? Me, worry ?
The People's Glorious Struggle Against the Opressive Running Dog Capitalists Bargain Barn offers 25% OFF to YOU AND EVERYBODY IN YOUR CADRE!!! So stop on by TODAY!!!
* * * * * * *
So, this capitalist lackey and his bourgeoisie imperialist masters walk into this bar looking to oppress the proletariat, see, and there's a frog on this one guy's head, see? And the bartender says, "Hey...what the heck is THAT?!" And the frog replies, "Well, it started as a wart on my ass..."
--Comrade Henny Youngman
I don't know how big standardized retailers work in China; I only shopped at one in Xian when I was there. But everywhere else, you're expected to bargain like crazy if you want to buy almost anything. Price cuts of up to 7/8 aren't uncommon. It takes tourists a while to catch on (it took us several days, not having a local guide), but after a while you get in the habit of just saying, "No, I don't want that", until the price gets haggled down by 50% maybe twice, maybe three times. I'm not terribly surprised to see this happening on a larger scale.
Isn't it the case that when someone hears about a new mob that is going for discounts for stuff this person doesn't even need, (s)he is more likely to join just because of a perceived advantage? It is strange, on one hand people seem to be cheap, on the other hand I am sure many of them end up spending money on things they don't really need.
I buy very few things. My appartment has one bed, 3 chairs (a gift, I didn't buy those,) a notebook computer, an old filing cabinet (another gift,) a couple of kettles, a frying pan, a steaming pot, some drinking glasses, an oscilloscope, a 3 way power transformer, a digital CPU programmer, an unfinished 3D printer, a few small tools, a VEX robot set with some addons, some clothing, a vacuum cleaner and a few normal household appliences (washer/dryer/fridge/stove/microwave oven/dishwasher.) That is it. I probably should get a sofa, but I am reluctant, I am thinking about building my own table, I havea built in bar-table. I've been living this way for the past 3 years and I think I have a little too much stuff. A buying mob like this would not interest me unless I could get ridiculous discounts, like really ridiculous, like 90% off, and I don't buy cheap stuff (as strange as it sounds,) everything I do own is quite expensive and of good quality.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, BestBuy tends to ignore their customers unless you come in for one very specific thing because you need it about an hour ago so you can't wait for delivery from an online retailer. In this case, you have blue shirts swarming around you trying to upsell you on everything.
The fact that I dress fairly nicely most of the time just seems to scream "comission" at them.
"I need it right now" is about the only reason I ever go there. The other reason is the occasional loss leader like burnable media priced cheaper than I can get it anywhere else.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
between organising 500 people to get a better buy on electrical goods and getting :)
500,000,000 to turn up at the offices of their ruling party to negotiate
a better government. Democracy is dead, long live smart mob!
Yep, have perused these folks' adventures and it makes for an interesting study in group dynamics/social psychology/retail paranoia. Although, you have to admit that it's not quite the same thing for a group to suddenly invade your retail establishment and stand around quietly not demanding nor purchasing anything.
It would be interesting to, say, grab 200 of your closest friends and march over to the local Fry's and tell them you'll clean out all their Athlon 64's and ECS motherboards if you give the whole mob 25% off. Of all the retailers I can thing of, Fry's might actually do it.
Well the blue-shirts didn't go and talk to discuss a discount, did they? They just appeared randomly on the floor and didn't talk to any manager or anything. If someone from the blue-shirts had immediately gone to the manager to discuse a collective discount or them going to a different store to buy the product instead things most likely would of been different. These 2 situations weren't alike at all.
It's just a matter of time where every city's residents get organized in this fashion IMHO. Who knows, maybe someone will create this smartmob.org web site to browse by city to find out what articles other smartmobbers are looking to buy and what is their target buy date.
Retailers won't be able to ignore these customers. Someone mentioned that the retailers will adjust their prices to accommodate the losses. Smartmob will ensure not to shop at those retailers. In fact the Smartmob could start organizing to manufacture and distribute the product desired in question at a better price.
Keep in mind the concept can be applied to the vast panoply of items the consumer gets screwed over on.
I've also heard of bartering clubs as a manner of evading taxes. I don't know much about these but does anyone here have a better understanding where pros and cons of both are and if they should mesh?
visit them here: http://www.gome.com.cn/ and as far as i could tell they are pretty expensive so I can see why they need mob.
MikMik Baby Organics Mikkaworks
It's not really a bad situation for the retailler. Mostly they run numbers like $/sf or $profit/$salaries, so having a large crowd of people ready to spend big bucks will let them keep those metrics high while reducing their margin.
If these really took off then it'd be more likely to see stores that only open to mobs. Why not start an electronics warehouse that has very low overhead and only opens to groups of 500 or more - you'd keep your running costs very low and probably shift as much product as bestbuy does being open til 10pm.
I think the parent post was from Canada (unless Future Shop has made its way into the US), where BestBuy employees do not make commission. (Future Shop does though)
-FL
Leave it to the Chinese to take a 'stupid human trick' and do something useful with it...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
In North America, 500 people will show up when Cabbage Patch dolls are released, and WANT to pay $60 a pop for them, and will kill each other over them to boot. You couldn't get 500 people in North America to agree on what color the sky is, let alone coordinate enough to get a discount on something they will pay double to get anyways.
Lets put it this day, how many people show up at a gas station and happily pay way too much money for gas.
We make too much money in North America, which is why while individually we may gripe about the cost of something, we will never coordinate to get a discount because we are too bitter, proud and stupid to want our neighbours to get a discount on it too.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It's a unique mix of free-market economics and communist ideals. Beautiful. Looks like these "communists" could one day get better than us at this whole capitalism thing.
Retailers always offer discounts for mass purchases anyway, so there's nothing harmful in this.
Actually, you only need 80 http://www.improveverywhere.com/mission_view.php?m ission_id=57
This is just Mercata in person, isn't it?
when you are with 500 people, it's a fine line between negotiating and threatening to get a discount.
This sounds more like a case of Chinese mass hysteria and a spin on a very common scam used by confidence tricksters and indeed marketers everwhere. Ok you are a retailer, you get someone skilled in the art to arange for 500 people to "flashmob" your store then you sell them loads of crap at the usual discount you give to everyone else - oh just be chance you have a few goody bags on hand. If I was ordering in quantities of 500 I would expect big discounts.
It works because people are happy to part with money when they see their peers doing likewise and they hate to pass up a bargain.
Trust the Economist to be taken in by it - but then they believed in that Enron really was a new business model based on the lightweight economy.
Things like Pipeline Card come to mind where by banding together theyre trying to negotiate better deals through collective buying power, and various proffesional bodies are able to negotiate discounts on other products (The Pipeline example is fuel)
Move 'Zig'.
For great discount.
Notice that the copyright at the bottom of the store website says: Copyright© 2000-2008 All Rights Reserved. Is this funny or what?
zing!
All your base are belong to Google.
I don't see this as anything new, other than people taking the initiative from the business world and the online world and putting it to practice in real life. People have been doing this for years in the US, although just not at mainstream companies (for example a lot of the aftermarket alloy rims forums online contain sections where groups of people negotiate a discount for ordering a large quantity). I have to commend them for taking it out to the streets where it is obviously working out for them, but it makes you wonder that if the retailer is happy and welcoming them in to offer 30% discount, just HOW high is the markup on consumer goods nowdays, both in China and globally.
Business Voyeur
...they used the word fortnight in the article. And that's just awesome.
What?
Somewhere in the rubble of the ancient dot-com bubble, there's a company called Priceline which aimed to do the same thing virtually. If memoory serves their idea was to aggregate buyers and contact a merchant to see if they'd meet the desired price.
Dell releases coupons with staggering discounts, those coupons go to "deal" sites. "Smart mob" of buyers with coupon codes floods Dell's website and gets their 30-40% off. Regular Joes continue to buy at twice of what they could have paid.
Get a rain check. A promise to back order the item at the sale or agreed upon price. If they do not honor it, then in most jurisdictions I know of they would be guilty of 'bait and switch'.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
A bit like how large groups of German 'tourists' claimed discount 'holidays' in Poland in the 1940's.
If only they used such power to fight for freedom and against the government instead of asking for discounts...
I'm confused. I thought the PRC wasn't affected by free market forces like this. Can someone please explain? How is it possible that the 'retailer' is able to drop prices in order to gain market share?
Larry Niven should be proud. Although IIRC his mob was walking off with stacks of flat-screen (again ahead of his time) televisions at a 100% discount.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A horde of blue-shirts also invaded [improveverywhere.com] Best Buy and walked away with NOTHING!
Not even a customary "Would You Like Extended Protection?"
Well since they didn't BUY anything, what sort of discount would they have been expecting? Ten percent off zero is still zero.
Also means there was nothing to sell extended warranties for.
All they did was pretend to be store employees (some doing a better job that some of the store's offical personnel), and annoy the management.
I'm surprised, but don't folks here use things like food co-ops and buyers clubs or swap clubs? Even municipal organized mass yard sale weekends* fall under this sort of discount sales from "mobs". I know food co-ops are quite common,I've belonged to several, all they are is a group of folks -"the mob"- who band together to get wholesale costs on food and assorted other grocery items. The difference here is the chinese version is more of a flash mob, but it isn't as well organized or structured from the description.
* we had one recently here,a multi mile organized and sanctioned locally giant yard sale. Quite fun taking half a day off and bargain shopping, and I actually saw a lot of "new" items that people put out, with multiples of each.
Thinking on this, seems like a group of people might organize around the web (in whatever numbers, hundreds to thousands?)in order to get deals on stuff, say the latest "must have" video card or something. All agree to be represented by the whizzbang vidcard buyers club, then start contacting vendors looking for a better quote than what they normally have, as long as you buy x-so many to make it worth their while. How about something like garnering linux support for hardware, you tell the vendor if they release such and such good open driver, you will buy so many new peripherals from them. It would have to be a big number probably, but seems like it might work better than the current begging and anarchy method.
Actually, this is closer to mercata.com's business. With Priceline, the seller can accept each buyer's bid separately, at whatever price each individual offers. Mercata was about group buying power: shoppers offer to buy a product at some price, with the understanding that the final price may go down if enough customers join in on the deal.
The other difference is that Priceline is still around, but Mercata isn't.
best buy sales associates do not make commission. their bosses however do, so they get hounded by their boss to be making sales.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Small details, but they didn't pretend to be store employees. They just had blue shirts, and would help people out if they were asked. They did not offer help, did not claim to work for the store, or anything of the sort. They just stood there and were generally nice people.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
Ahh yes, I remember buying a Palm IIIx organizer through Mobshop around 1998. It was as cheap as any other site, and if I could just get 7 friends to buy one, the price would drop an additional $3.74. They even offered to spam my friends for me. This of course is a recipe for having 7 fewer friends.
Mobshop were so pathetically grateful for my business they sent me Christmas cards and swag until they folded. Not a sustainable business model.
Before Amazon and eBay dominated, there were lots of alternative approaches to selling bulk lots of goods on the Internet; for example OnSale.com tried Dutch auctions, reverse auctions, etc. Slate has a good article on the economic theory behind it all.
The problem with such bulk schemes is everyone involved is gambling that somewhere in the supply chain there's a warehouse overstocked with goods, i.e. that distribution is inefficient. I think the real power of such auctions is only apparent when manufacturers sell direct. They reap the most benefit from economies of scale and tailoring production to demand. Imagine if Amazon was just a showroom for purchases built-to-order and shipped directly from the manufacturer. You'd buy an organizer through Amazon for $150 with a firm shipping date from the manufacturer, and a promise that if more people order before then, your price will go down. To motivate you further, Amazon could provide you a spiff code such that if family and friends bought more, you'd get a share in Amazon's slight commission.
ShowroomShipDirect, TailoredLeanProduction, and PSC (Personal Spiff Code) are all © skierpage, contact me for licensing.
=S
With that many people, why did they want to get a retail discount? I would have found the wholesalers and drummed them up for one.... or better still, used the people to form a company!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
In Australia http://www.bulkbuyer.com.au/ is already doing this.
You can usually buy direct. The HeadFi people are known to do things like that. Find X people that want a certian headphone, enough that you are over the minimum for direct sales. Have one guy collect the cash, place the order, then ship the phones out to all the buyers. You end up with a substantial discount since you are paying what the retailers pay, esssentially.
"Power to the People?"
Somebody thinks that mindless consumerism is power? Woah!!
Sure, for the retailer. For the people, its just a mindless reflex.
C'mon. folks, we want to improve capitalism, not mirror its worst endlessly
The thing a lot of people seem to be missing is that the store keepers are not giving discounts out of any kind of altruism or fear of the mob, they are doing it because they make more money. They are increasing the volume by so much that even with the discount that they are offering they are still making a significant profit.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What the hell has to do haggling with capitalism or communism ?
There is haggling in a lot more countries than China, lots of them capitalists and with democracies. I happen to live in one of those.
It just seems that you don't travel outside your country (and neither your moderators).
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
You don't travel to many countries besides China. Or you simply don't care.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Like every other consumer in first and second world countries are doing.
Yup. We're all political reformation machines... except those dirty Chinese.
Thank you for you wisdom and leadership, Captain Shitmunch.
... you can just hear that cash register going: "Ka-chink!"
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I give you a book, and in return you give me, say, a radio - we have come to a deal to exchange two goods of equal value to each other, in effect "bartering" one item for the other, no money changing hands.
Now, you tell me that according to the government (depending on your government, of course), we each have to "pay taxes" on that transaction? What fuckin' rabbit hole did I fall down into, anyway?
I can sorta understand the reasoning behind all of this - after all, money is nothing more than tokens which represent value which are bartered for physical goods which have real value. Therefore, if there is sales tax on a good, that tax is then paid with money. In the barter, the tax is "included" in the value of the barter exchange - it is just up to each of us when we do this to "be honest" and report it to the IRS on our income taxes, right?
Bastards, the whole lot of 'em! The fuckin' machine can never be satisfied, even if feed our soul's into its gaping maw. Tell me again why we citizens continue to support this mess?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Apparently they need the discounts cause they spend all their time chatting on the internet and not working. I doubt the mob mentallity would work in the U.S. retail areana.
Small details, but they didn't pretend to be store employees. They just had blue shirts, and would help people out if they were asked.
If it looks like a duck,
and walks like a duck,
and quacks like a duck...
They might as well purchase directly to the distributor, which already sells the goods to the retailer at a discount price.
Doh!
In the U.S., a smart mob is called a "Costco" or "SAM's".
There was an auction house in my town selling a boatload of second-hand government surplus 21" monitors. They had so many at one stage that they were actually offering them for sale on their website (at about $US150 equivalent) instead of just at auction.
I wondered if I could get a further discount. So I asked a couple of colleagues if they'd be interested. They were. I called the place and said "I can take a chunk of those off your hands, what's your best price?" They told me about another sixth off (~$US125 equivalent) if I could guarantee fifty units and take care of delivery myself.
I put a note on the purely local bulletin board at work. By noon I was getting calls and emails from staff at the other end of the city. By the next day, I was getting queries from other organisations. Six hours after that, it seemed everyone and their mates and their family and their mates' families' dentists' goldfish was calling me.
I took orders, drove around the city and collected several thousand bucks in cash, then told everyone to turn up to the auction house that evening. One flash mob later, seventy-one monster-sized monitors were gone. I even delivered a couple myself to people who had wanted one but couldn't be there to pick it up.
I still have and use two of them. They're not brilliant, but considering this was just before LCD screens for desktops took off, they were well worth it.
Interesting concept, overall it wouldn't work well in the US due to corporate pricing and whatnot. However, my brother-in-law does something somewhat related. He is on a mass email group list for DVD releases. I'm not sure how it came about, he might have had a hand in doing it, but what it basically is is a bunch of local people in some sort of organized database that will get emails on new DVDs coming out. If they want to purchase it they will reply with the quantity and after the total is figured this group will buy a palette or two of that DVD at a wholesale price which is usually around $10 cheaper than if they went to Walmart or wherever. Sometimes I get some from him, but if you get enough people you can cut out the middle man. In theory this could work for most any thing if there were people who wanted to take on the responsibility of tracking data and organizing it. Just think what kind of discounts you could get with a group as big as slashdot. You could get wholesale on who knows what.
1. You and 499 other people charter a plane.
2. Go to China.
3. Get stuff cheap.
?????
5. Profit!
down the street.
;)
"Look, a $50 note, lying right there on the pavement" said one.
"Don't be silly," said the other, "if it was, somebody would picked it up already!"
Hmm, brokering a low price on an item by guaranteeing high volume... how did that word go again... oh yeah: retailer. Seriously, this is exactly what Best Buy does every day of the year when they call up manufacturer/distributor X and say "We'll put that in front of our 'flash mob' of people who we're going to induce to come to our stores tomorrow, in return you'll give it to us for 50% of the MSRP. Now if you don't sell to us we'll guarantee our 'flash mob' DOESN'T purchase from you, bwahaha.".
People have already pointed out that co-ops, big-box retailers, etc are all just variants on this model. Ditto any number of eBay sellers, dot-bombs, etc.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
...the 21 year old minimum wage store manager would call the police. Who would tear gas and arrest every single shopper for tresspassing and then spend 5 days with the Department of Homeland Security trying to figure out the terrorism plot.
Happy 230th everyone.
Just shop local. All of the local retailers that we have around here are cheaper than the big box stores. Electronics, Pet supplies, Clothes, etc. I wouldn't step into one of those stores if you paid me.
You're pretty much right. Wikipedia:"Perfect competition is an economic model that describes a hypothetical market form in which no producer or consumer has the market power to influence prices." A large number of buyers would be a market imperfection ie. an oligopsony.
If you can guarantee 500 people buying things, then this is a definite increase in volume.
Short term, but what happens to sale volume over the following weeks when those 500 people already have what they want, and on other occassions when they mob your competition?
You've mis-read it. One guy had bought a TV _for_ his new apartment. As in, he had just bought a home from somewhere else, and then discovered that he also needs a TV, furniture, etc. So he joined such a group and bought them at wholesale prices.
As for what you could buy in the USA that way, well, I don't know about the USA, but here in Germany most retailers have pretty large margins on anything. Just look on how much they can cut the prices periodically on some stuff, for no other reason than the doctrine that people coming to buy that will also buy something else.
In part that extra money goes on "shelf space" and the like. I.e., it costs you money in rent and salaries to keep something on the shelves or in the warehouse for months. You can also calculate a sort of a cost for slow selling products in money lost by not stocking something else that sells faster.
So I don't know if showing up unexpected would work, but if you called in advance only a complete PHB would refuse to give you a 10% wholesale discount on something that they marked up by 50%. It's a lot of profit in a burst, and if he's smart he'll realize that it's 100% profit. At that large size of an order you could have contacted the wholesaler directly instead, and bypassed the retailer completely. E.g., if you wanted to buy 100 kitchen furniture sets, like in the article, you could probably have contacted Ikea directly instead and taken it at their wholesale prices.
But at the very least it's stuff which:
A) otherwise would cost him shelf space for months or even sit on the shelf until it's outdated. Such a burst sale is pretty much as good as selling it directly from the truck.
B) otherwise would have been spread between him and all the competition. E.g., here if you wanted to buy a TV, you can go to Saturn, Media Markt, Pro Markt, or a dozen others, and that's not even counting the hundreds of online shops. Heck, you can get a TV from Aldi, which is mostly a cheap grocery store chain. So 500 people coming together to buy from, say, Saturn are better than 50 coming to Saturn and 450 going to buy from somewhere else, which is what would realistically happen otherwise. Selling at half the profit margin, but to 10 times more people, can be pretty good business. (After all, Aldi built a retail empire on that doctrine.)
Of course, I've never heard of people doing that here, but I have a strong suspicion that it would work if anyone tried.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
LetsBuyIt.com had (and still has - heh, they're still around) this idea of pitching a price per number of units requested, which steadily decreased in blocks as the requests increased (1-50, 51-150, 151-300 etc).
It does seem very much like this idea, only this one does it "live", so to speak.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow. BOOM!
4: Import and resell cheap stuff.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Pronunciation is one thing, but official spelling is another.
:)
/US citizen //Basic Whitey ///Lives in Beijing
Also...
The rules of shopping in Beijing...
-Prices are negotiable. (Sometimes, somewheres)
-Bartering is expected. (Usually, but not always)
-If you are non-Chinese, be prepared to pay more than the locals. (Always)
When it comes to "vendors", as opposed to "stores", there is a "rule of thumb" for: what the vendor asks for vs. what they really expect to get.
-I'm not gonna tell you what it is.
-Come to the Beijing Olympics. Hire me as a guide. Then, I'll help.
Modern China is all about capitalism. Really. No joke.
As others have said, most places in the U.S. this wouldn't work, since (1) corporate stores won't do discounts, and (2) only a jerk would negotiate a price at a mom-and-pop store that's already being undercut by the Wal-Mart and Costco down the street. (One exception: those cluttered electronics stores in New York City. Haggle to your heart's content there.) In China, except for higher-end shopping districts, negotiating the price is expected.
A problem with group-buy is this: when negotiating, one should always be prepared to walk away. My wife and I used this move in China several times, and it almost always resulted in an instant price cut. With 500 people, seems like it would be tough to get enough momentum to head for the door. That much mass takes that threat off the table.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
" (1) corporate stores won't do discounts,"
I ahve yet to hear of any store that won't offer volume discounts.
If 500 people showed up at wall-mart and asked for a discount, they would probably get it. The only thing that would be a set backis a manager who would [pass it up the chain what was happening.
But I know after 1 or two shots, wal-mart, and others, would create a process to support this easier.
"only a jerk would negotiate a price at a mom-and-pop store that's already being undercut by the Wal-Mart and Costco down the street."
When I worked in mom and pop computer shops, they would give a discount. It would be based on what discount they would get from there vendors since there next order would be larger then most.
"With 500 people, seems like it would be tough to get enough momentum to head for the door. "
This works in its favor, because a) stores will want to get those 500 into the store, and b) the secondary items those people purchase will easy any discount.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In the United States if you want to buy 500 of something, why not buy it wholesale? If you contacted the maker of a product and told him that you want several hundred of it, I am sure that he would be happy to oblige.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I do not think that this would be the best option in the United States. Instead, I would contact the maker of a product and tell him that I want 500 of it. I think that they would be happy to oblige.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.