Have you ever had a buisness relation with a chinese company? Well if, you have most likely also the companys various cell phone numbers, minimum 4. It is the first thing they give you. And also the second etc.
After a while i discovered why. In 99 % of the cases a cell phone is the only possibility to reach them. Though existing internet-sites and postal addresses and faxes, the common chinese buisnessman will only answer to the little transistor-bunch that is his mobile phone.
I guess back in the 16th cenury the comparrison would have been the translator. But what can only happen when we let machines do work we did ourselves before?
It'll get more expensive. Thats at least how i explain it to myself.
We wanted to buy about 200 Plastic Figurines, 3 inch high. Because we had reselling intentions it was obvious to look for a company which produces them, to eliminate the Merchant in between and to enlarge our profit margins.
Then we found a company which 1. answered our mails 2. had also about 6 different mobiles and 3. produced exactly what we wanted. Lets say the competition was very weak (they did not reply to any of our communication attempts) thats we thought we give company XY a try.
Sorted and armed with their article numbers we selected what we wanted (20 different figurines 10 pieces each).
And the answer from china is:
5700 $
Can you fucking believe that?
Well they said that they would have to produce the certain figurines and could only do minimums of 30 each.
That trippled our order and contributed its part to the harrasing price. I mean still, nearly 6 grand for 600 shitty plastic figures from china???
I needed time to get over this. This unshy inquiry for 6 grand from china shook my world picture and i refused to write back to that company in hope that they would get embarressed about theirselves what greedy bastards they are.
The only thing happening though, was a chinese man named Jackie, who started to spam my email account. And i mean spam. Dozens of product catalogues inqiry's offers and literally hundreds of mails which asked for my ok to the offer.
I refused again. There was still hope that enlightment crosses the path of this blind shoemaker.
And Asia proofed again that it is still imune to western logik or ways of thinking.
Mr. Jackie continued to spam me and i continued to do like i've never seen all these mails piling up in my inbox. I hesitated to delete them for the likely case of finding 6 grand on my doorstep and so Jackie took over my inbox. So I occasionly wrote back that we'll keep in mind that he's the guy with the plastic people but we only wanted to know what these little people cost.
He did not care. I could have been talking to a cabbage. He happily continued to send me product catalogues and other mails, 134 over 5 weeks in total.
After finaly admitting that i had no chance, i moved all these mails and contacted Mr. China. I basicly told him that the trippled order would respectfully disagree with our original order and 6000 Dollars are not to be spent on fucking plastic figurines, hence no deal in sight. But still, when the doorstep money arrives i gonna call him up and we start producing tiny expensive chinese plastic figurines.
One hour later my inbox blinks and shows me there is activity and somebody wants to communicate with me. It's Jackie!
The bloody genius tells me that we could level the price at about 3 grand. Good round number.
I was shocked again. He never saw a picture of mine and i was never that polite that he could have fallen in love with me. Why the sudden price drop?
I was still thinking about the confusing tactics of a chinese Merchant as half an hour later another email arrives. What wonder... its Jackie. Must feel cosy in my inbox...
And?! He mentions that it would be possible to even drop the price to 1800 or 600 $.
Now I am again completely confused.
Did i win now with my plan of letting this Sherriff from Notthingham feel that the "tax" was slightly to high, and could bring 20 families easily through a hard winter.
Or did I not open my mouth fast enough about the circumstance that money is short these times. Or did he try like his fellow asians to have a trip through my wallet before others would get the shiny contents.
What it was or is, i will probably never know, but i do know this: if i wanna do further buisness in asia, i gonna need a whole lot more email addresses!
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