Well we've back a week from our break in the UK, although as soon as we landed we went off to Halong Bay for the weekend. It's simply stunning , and a 'must' for any visitor to Vietnam. A photographer's paradise.
In my last posting I promised to discuss shopping and retail......so here I go, although it's hard to know where to start. I guess the first thing to say is that I just can't get to grips with the economics of retail in Hanoi. There are simply thousands of shops. These range from shopping malls, row upon row of independent shops, roadside stalls, women on bikes with flowers ( see below) or a glass cabinet on the back, and lots of markets. And they all have one thing in common......they are stacked 'sky high' with stock; sometimes to the point that you can't get in the door. Heaven alone knows what will happen when internet shopping takes over in Vietnam.
I can't present any logical order to my thoughts about retail, so this is just a series of observations I guess.......
There are very few 'familiar' retail names out here. On the 'fast food 'front KFC is massive , but we've yet to see a Starbucks or Mcdonalds. The 'Mcdonalds' here is called Lotteria and I've tried one and I'd happily go back. I'm guessing that the issues around creating a retail franchise network in Vietnam are quite complicated and the competition would be fierce.
In many cases shops selling the same kind of goods are clustered together. So you will get a row of shops selling sunglasses, a row of shops selling sports goods, hardware shops, shoe shops etc etc. To me this only heightens the level of competition, but I guess it's a cultural thing whereby the consumer broadly knows the city area and street to go to.
A very interesting phenomenom is the 'trust' that is given to supermarkets. In the UK ( and I am really generalising here) , we would tend to 'trust' an independent greengrocer or a market stall more than we would a supermarket. Here though (and I think this is more from the 'middle classes') we have been told 'always buy your fruit and veg from the supermarkets as you can trust them way more than a local vendor where you just don't know what chemicals they have sprayed '.
Whilst I'm not a lawyer so can't really explain this properly I am told that copyright law either doesn't exist in Vietnam, or is very weak. That is one of the reasons why (I have read) some 'high tech' businesses are reticent about bringing their operations to Vietnam, which therefore remains largely a home for 'low tech' business investment. In respect to retail , weak copyright has real implications. Consider this; we met a person who had bought a watch from the Duty Free at Hanoi airport and was very pleased that at 'several hundered dollars' it was a real bargain as 'back home' it woud have been at least a thousand bucks. All was well for a year until it went in for service to an authorised service centre in the US, only to be told that it was a fake.
So whenever I see a 'branded' item for sale , there is always a thought....'.is it the real thing?'. This isn't so much the case for goods like Iphones or Samsung TV's as these work out to be exactly the same price as in the West. And for other things it just doesn't matter. So i'm quite happy to go to the local DVD store and buy the latest blockbuster movie for about 50 pence or a whole series such as Boardwalk Empire for about 3 pounds. At these prices you have to quesion the authenticity but provided you don't mind the Japanese subtitles (sometimes) , I can't tell the difference.
Another fascinating link between copyright and enterprise is in respect to books. Now Karen is a member of two bookgroups. It's, the usual thing; whereby the group decides on a book and everybody reads it and they then discuss it. But how do you buy several copies of the same 'western' paperback in Vietnam? Well what you do is bring one copy into the country, and take it to the local photocopier shop. They will unglue the book, copy it , and produce ( who knows how) several exact copies , including the cover for about 2 dollars each. And you get back your original book which looks as good as new. The whole thing is simply amazing.
What different types of shop or culturally surprisingly different products do you see? Here are two interesting ones. Firstly there are lots of shops which sell nothing but 'safes'. Big old fashioned ones which weigh a ton and have tumbler dials. I think this must relate to lots of people not yet having bank accounts. We have one of these at home and there is one in the office. Now believe you me , there is an enormous satisfaction in moving the tumbler to and fro to enter the code ( 10 alternate turns altogether) and the safe then creaking open. The second example might just be me not paying attention to new trends in the west , but here the fashion in Hi-Fi is to have the biggest speakers you can possibly find. The Hi-Fi shops ( of course all grouped together) seem to be having a competition as to who can sell the tallest, fattest, speakers. No good for us minimilists. Oh and I forgot to mention shops on boats ( see picture)I've mentioned it already but the really aspirational brand is 'Apple'. Given what people earn here, and given the number of Iphones and Ipads that we see, people must be happy to commit a vast percentage of their disposable income to own one. And there are shops with 'Apple' signage everywhere. Some say 'authorised reseller', some say 'authorised' and some say nothing. I don't know what level of input Apple has into the way its goods are sold here, but they sure as hell sell a lot of product.
All the shops tend to be open all the way through the day and right into late evening. It's no problem for the staff because if they are tired they just lie down and go to sleep. I've twice left a shop as I didn't want to disturb the gentle slumbers of the shop assistant.
So these are my thoughts. Nothing meaningful or insicive, nothng that a retail analyst looking to invest in Vietnam would find useful. Just my ramblings. But I hope you enjoyed them.And to cap it all I'm finishing with some schoolboy humour. The concept of 'Hung Long' being a minimart made me chuckle.
I'll post again in 2 or 3 weeks.
Cheerio everybody
Kevin
