Witnessing a Change in Chinese Commercial Culture

Even just going to a supermarket with your grandmother can be a
learning experience in China. As a relatively new phenomenon that did
not really take off in China until the early 90s, supermarkets are
still a sort of middle class luxury rarely experienced by elders and
people in the rural areas. In fact, for everyday shopping (especially
for food), supermarkets of any kind are considered rather high end
(and prices reflected this), with most Chinese preferring to buy their
raw vegetables and sorts in open air markets with small stalls rather
than get them all packaged from local supermarkets.

Even the middle class thinks that those open air markets (sort of like
"farmers' markets" in the States) have fresher local produce directly
from the fields, whereas the goods in the supermarkets are
commercially produced, meaning that they are made with high quantities
of chemicals and are shipped from areas far far away. Of course, once
you go to the open air markets, you know that can't be true. Each
vendor sells in the upward of 20 to 30 kinds of different vegetables
in their stalls (whereas the average vendor at farmer's markets
probably have a few), meaning that even if they do indeed produce
vegetables at home (as the customers believe), they are still buying
at least some of them from wholesalers.

In other words, the only difference between an open-air market and a
supermarket is that the vendor is your local moms and pops instead of
some gigantic corporate establishment. The actual quality and even
price of the goods on sale are not that different at all. Its just
that the supermarket are charging a higher price for branding reasons
rather than as reflection of quality. Of course, for people like my
grandmother, the open-air markets are no doubt more comfortable
environment, with familiar ways of doing business that has been in
place for thousands of years.

But if I am any reflection of the mental state of the younger
generations in China, the death of open-air markets are probably
already destined. Loudness and smell aside, an open-air market just
does not seem to appeal to the fashion and style-conscious youth. The
open-air markets, run and used primarily by old people (and migrants
from the countryside) obviously does not reflect a sense of modernity
China tries to convey. In this way, the open-air markets are quite
like those counterfeit fashion markets the government is closing down
despite lament of foreign tourists.

As I personally stated to many people on multiple occasions, haggling,
despite being an extremely efficient way to balance out supply and
demand if correctly used, is, if subjected to confusion and utter
violation of commercial regulation, can easily be source of deception
and a tool for organized crime. Haggling, in fact, also goes on in
open-air markets. Vegetables and other food items like raw meat,
while not valuable and particularly appealing as things that can be
used for profiteering through deceit, is, in fact, very dangerous if
not properly checked.

For large open-air markets where hundreds of vendors come and go at
will, consumers have nowhere to go if they buy foods that are sprayed
with chemicals to disguise bad quality. Individual vendors, without
proper licenses to operate and easily mobile, have the ability and
incentive to pull off such an act, unlike a supermarket, where each
problem with an item sold leads to sufficient damage to reputation
that can reduce profit over time.

But as I look to my grandmother getting confused by the lines in front
of cash registers, I, at the same time, wonder when and if there
actually will be a day all the open-air markets are replaced with
supermarkets. Of course, the small vendors have much to lose.
Supplying to supermarkets would greatly reduce their profits and even
if they hold on to stalls at ever-decreasing number of open-air
markets, they no longer have ability to price inconsistently with the
ubiquitous supermarkets.

But on a positive note for consumers, when supermarkets selling food
items become more common, the prices are bound to decrease. Its the
same effect McDonalds and KFC expansions had on Chinese fast food
market. Even the most luxurious-sounding foreign supermarket chain
need to battle on prices to survive in the ultra-competitive and
highly unregulated Chinese retail market. And finally, as the old
guards of traditions dies out, maybe open-air markets, like so many
other historical institutions, will enter the history books in China.
It once again proves that in China power of modernity can ruthlessly
brush aside age-old tradition.