If you're a foreigner (i.e. white) you'll reallyy have a tough time here. Expect to be ripped off at least double the price. Especially at stores where they don't have marked prices. Even if they do have marked prices, expect to be ripped off anyway. The marked prices are sometimes not even the real price, and they're just there for you to feel like you've bargained the price down.
This rule of ripping people off doesn't just apply to white people, it also applies to viet kieu (vietnamese people living abroad) - i.e. me. The bad thing about me and my mum is that you can spot that we're tourists from a mile away. We don't dress like everyone here, and we're not yet black from the sun. My mum has red hair and trust me, as soon as I open my mouth to speak, the price of everything probably doubles because you can instantly tell that I ain't from around here. I really should have paid more attention in viet school. But even so, there's no way of hiding my english accent.
So anyway back onto my story of how we got ripped off. Me and mum were at the Ben Thanh market again yesterday and we saw this really nice set of a lacquerware bowl, plate and pair of chopsticks. The marked price was 180,000 dong for one set ($16 - bloody expensive for vn!!). So my mum was like cmon, what's the real price? The shop girl was like okay I'll give it to you for 150,000 dong. So then my mum was like well, what if we buy 10 sets? make it cheaper.. And after alot of bargaining and no, that's too expensive and just tell us the REAL price! we ended up getting it for about 110,000 dong or so for each set. We sure were happy with ourselves for getting the price down from 180,000 to 110,000 so when we went 3 stalls down and saw the exact same set, we were like hmm.. I wonder how much they are here. Imagine how shattered we were when the girl was like oh they're 85,000 dong for a set. And that was her initial price. Imagine what we could have gotten them for if we had had a chance to bargain with her.
So, the moral of the story is:
Shop around for prices before buying ANYTHING. Lesson well and truly learnt.
Oh, and what's with vietnam's xmas craze? Aren't the majority of people here supposed to be buddhist or something?
P.S. This giant snowman at my hotel is creeping me out.
That's why I'm always too scared to ask other places how much the thing I bought already was/hate going into stores where I've already bought something to see it discounted.
ReplyDeleteAlso, bargaining is really exhausting, like - you have to pretend to walk away and then go back when you really want it.
But also, TAG!
my word verif is 'stess', almost like stress, which is what bargaining is.
lol we did that once, where we bargained down to a certain price but still thought it was expensive so walked away. but when we decided we'd just take it and came back, the lady was like no you can't have it, it's too late now. which i thought was pretty dumb seeing as by doing that she's just losing business for herself lol.
ReplyDelete