Letter from Beijing: I've always had a phobic attitude to helpful shop assistants, regarding even the most polite "Can I help you?" as a prelude to a nightmarish, real life re-enactment of a Fast Show "Suits you, sir!" sketch in which gangs of rabid salespeople mob me and force me to buy two-tone shirts or check trousers.
My idea of a proper shopping experience demands two things: salespeople who remain utterly invisible until I have decided whether to buy; and clearly marked prices. Look at the price, look at the goods, take them or leave them. So I didn't think I'd like shopping in China one little bit.
In China, supermarkets and department stores display their prices clearly, and you pay straightforwardly for what you want. But the prices and the range of goods tend to be better in the markets - big, multistorey buildings with hundreds of tiny shops on each floor.
The most startling of them, the Pearl Market in Beijing, has fish on the bottom floor (dried sharks fins, huge slabs of tuna, live eels, crabs, lobsters, sea anemones and turtles), exquisite jade and pearls on the top floor, and everything else in between. And whether you want a real sea-horse or a fine jade imitation of one, the price is not a fact but a process, not a statement but a long and perhaps passionate argument.
She quotes you a price, you make a counter offer (a third of her price is usually a good starting point), she concedes that she likes you so you can have a special price (still far too high), you raise your bid a bit, she lowers hers, and so on until you make your "last price" offer, followed by your "last, last price" and, eventually, a deal.
Shopping in a Chinese market is a lesson in raw economics. What is something worth? The cost of making and distributing it, plus enough profit to keep the manufacturer happy, plus the seller's rent and overheads, plus - and here's the rub - whatever the buyer is prepared to pay.
And that last question entails a whole set of other questions, especially for westerners in whose culture the ancient art of haggling has been all but forgotten. How much do you want it? What do you think you'd pay for it at home? How easily do you get embarrassed? Are you any good at poker? As a long-time western resident in Beijing told me the first time I went to a market: "It's not a transaction, it's a blood sport."
It's sport, though, that's complicated by sex and ego. Most of the shopkeepers are young women, and almost all of them know that flattery and flirtation are pretty useful ways to manipulate the buyer, especially if he is a middle-aged western man.
But attempts to play on the client's ego can fall foul of the cultural specificity of flattery. I finally realised how hopelessly old I am when I went with my 16-year-old son to buy a belt for each of us. His bargaining process began with the line: "I give you good price because you are so handsome." Mine began with: "I give you good price because you remind me of my uncle." (Meaning, presumably, that her uncle, too, is a specky, balding streak of misery, who, like me, evokes her deepest feelings of pity.)
Instead of softening me up, the intended compliment merely made me spitefully determined to really get a good price.
The business of ego works both ways, however. Haggling has an etiquette, and like much else in China, it is shaped by the importance of not losing face. If the seller quotes a ridiculously high initial price, you can turn it against them by seeming to be genuinely insulted by the implication that you might be stupid enough to pay it.
A ridiculously low counteroffer can equally be turned against you, especially if you are a westerner: have you no shame, coming over here and expecting to pick up everything for nothing? And you can't enter a bargaining process without being prepared to buy: refusing a fair price after a good haggle is genuinely insulting and backtracking on an offered price is even worse.
One advantage of this delicate system, in which the ideal outcome is for both sides in the bargain to feel that they have done well and not lost face, is that you get to know rather quickly when you've paid far too much.
The unfailing sign of humiliating failure is that, after you've handed over your money, the seller unctuously tells you what a good haggler you are and how hard a bargain you drive. This is purely compensatory, like the manager of the team that has just won by 20 points telling the disgraced opponents that they played really well and just didn't get the run of the ball. When the seller feels the need to spare your blushes, you've really screwed up.
The dynamics of the haggling process create a paradox: you're much more likely to get something cheap if you don't really want it. You discover this if you pick up something just to look at it, out of pure curiosity. The seller offers you a price, and, as you walk away trying to explain that you're not buying, it falls to a half, a third, a quarter, as you recede into the distance. For stuff you don't want to buy, walking away works like a dream. But unless you're Daniel Day Lewis or Meryl Streep, it's very difficult to create the same impression that you wouldn't take the lousy tat off their hands for free when it's bucketing rain and you need an umbrella.
I'm not that good at it, and I'm sometimes so bad I get lavish compliments on my bargaining skills. But I've come to enjoy it much more than I thought I would. I've learned some simple techniques, like watching until a Chinese person buys whatever it is I want, to get an idea of what the real (which is to say, not for gullible foreigner) price might be; or wearing something like what I want to buy so I can insist that I bought it last week at another market for a fraction of the ridiculous price being demanded.
The whole drama can be psychologically exhausting, and you have to be in the mood for it, but it's a real human transaction, with at least a workable illusion that something more is going on than the inexorable distribution of commodities.
It's a purchase, of course, but also a game, an encounter, a dance. Next time you order a pint, try offering your publican a euro instead of the five he's asking for, and take it from there. You'll both find it much more entertaining.
