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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.
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?
I was going to mention the same thing about automotive group buys. I think you answered your own question there actually...
I have seen people who failed to organize a group buy turn on the brand. In said case, more than one company made swaybars. Company 2 was approached, and now they have loyal customers who have a bad experience with company 1 and proceed to spread the news through word of mouth. The overall affect can be huge on a small business. I realize this may not be such a leverage point with Best Buy or a big retailer, but bad PR is bad PR.
Where in the US do you pay "too much money for gas"?
when you are with 500 people, it's a fine line between negotiating and threatening to get a discount.
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.
I've never understood the logic that says when people become happy consumers that FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY are right around the corner. If anything, our experience in the U.S. points to the opposite.
While democracy might give rise to capitalism, it doesn't follow that capitalism will give rise to democracy. The two are not equivalent.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.