depicted: Tokyo.
The sheer freedom of buying exactly what you need, and to pay accordingly for it, is a pleasure most people in Hong Kong take for granted. It is in fact a privilege and a commodity to have access to such a wide range of products. The act of purchase requires a lower incentive; supply of products is overwhelming. Why is this? I think I found the answer.
First, let’s look at what I’ve grown up to know is retail and commerce. The Netherlands, with all due respect, is not exactly the shining example of a thriving retail community, although in its own mindset, it’s doing quite well. Take any random shopping street: what do you see?
You see a supermarket, by and far the largest supplier of anything remotely edible; you see a bakery, providing fresh bread and cake at a much higher price than the supermarket, but the products are arguably more delicious; you see a chain drugstore, largest supplier of anything remotely inedible, but not necessarily body care products as primary product; you see a bookstore, which sells mainly magazines and top 10 books; here and there some scarce fashion boutiques. Shops in villages are often deserted during the daytime — most products are not cheap or in relation to their expenses.
The quality of most of these products is dawdling, for one particular reason: so is the desire to purchase it. The consumer has to make do with whatever is on supply, and if that supply is homogenous everywhere, there is no incentive to need better things. The main reason for this is lack of competition, due to heavy taxes and overhead expenses imposed on a shopkeeper. This is also why it’s common to find only chain stores and hardly no individually owned shops, where shopkeepers improve their product quality by manual selection or based on local needs.
Hong Kong, being devoid of complicated tax laws, enjoys the benefit of such a free market, and there is an overabundance (in a healthy, “jungle” way) of individual shopkeepers pushing their homegrown products, based on what they feel their market needs most for the value which is more appropriate. These Hong Kong shop owners are more in touch with the market than chief executives of retail chains in the Netherlands.
When less expenses are calculated into each product, the purchase rate improves. On a longer scale, it doesn’t only imply that people buy more ‘stuff’, but are more engaged in cutting a profitable deal in their purchase of a necessary object, such as for instance a rice cooker. Right now, in a radius of two blocks, I know from the top of my head five shops which sell rice cookers, all in according price ranges from lousy-but-cheap to hideously expensive-but-reliable, and I live in a residential area. In Central there’s a ten-fold available.
In my old situation in the Netherlands, if I were looking for a bread toaster (comparable but cheaper product of equal necessity; bread and rice replace each other in the food pyramid), I had exactly one opportunity within a 10 km radius, which was an chain electronic shop where it appeared as if they were always vacuuming the floor every time I get there. Finding comparative products in other stores was hard, you often had to resort going online and this still poses uncertainties about the product — information is often lacking.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the retail market in Hong Kong is overwhelming for obvious reasons, and that this is a model of a healthy economy. It’s a pleasant saturation, because there are no obligations which hinder business in an irrelevant way. A shopkeeper should spend time looking for good deals to push to his customers, not spend his valuable time figuring out illogical Chamber of Commerce registrations.
