Day 5 - Ben Tanh Market
Ben Tanh Market is perhaps one of the most famous and popular shopping place for tourists. The market offers a large variety of products from coffee powder and tea leaves to clothes and accessories.
One of the things that struck me most was the amount competition that exists within the market. Many shops were selling similar if not the same products and as a prospective customer, I could feel the intense rivalry and competition between the shops. There was plenty of touting going on and the shop keepers were always trying to pull you to their shop to have you view their products and entice you to make a purchase.
Another significant cultural aspect of the Vietnamese would be bargaining. As mentioned earlier, there is an extremely high level of competition between the stores and as a result, when bargaining with the store vendors, one will never hear a straight “no” from the Vietnamese. Instead, the store vendors would try to strike a deal with you no matter how ridiculous a price a customer quotes. In addition to that, whenever a customer request for example a white coloured t-shirt he wishes to purchase, the store vendor will never say “no” even though he does not have the colour. They will instead take out more and different coloured t-shirts and try to convince the customer that the other colours are actually nicer.
This ‘theory’ of not saying “no” is largely due to the fact that Vietnamese place a great deal of importance on saving face and there is also the fear of offending the other party should they be too straight forward in rejecting them.
Also at Ben Tanh Market, I was astonished at the thriving market of counterfeiting goods and the amount of fake products that are in circulation. This is especially in the clothing line where imitations of famous international brands such as a Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie are rife.
With that, I feel that counterfeiting is a prevalent problem in Vietnam as patent and intellectual property rights laws are not clearly established. Often, counterfeit products with the same logo and packaging will appear on the market soon after a product is launched, at a much cheaper price.
posted by weiliang @ 4:16 PM
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