Electronics Department Store

On Friday, we visited an electronics department store.  I was thrilled to come because I am really interested in computers.  People said that there were ten floors in all, but I only made it up to the third floor because we only had an hour to look around.  The outside didn't really get my hopes up, since the building doesn't look like anything special, but the inside is really bright and modern!

The outside of the building

The first floor had a lot of cellphone and camera stores.  The sellers were all pretty aggressive in getting you to see the stuff they were selling.  They’d say stuff like “I know you need a cellphone” or “Let me help you find a camera you need.”  I guess that’s the product of the insane competition there – pretty much everybody was selling the same thing, so you gotta do what you gotta do to sell to the customers.

Look at all these computer stores!

I didn’t look at the cameras, but the cellphones were really expensive.  A standard Android smartphone could go up to 3000 RMB, which is around 480 USD!  Sometimes the price would be even higher.  We also stopped by an Apple store, which may or may not have been a real Apple store.  Apple doesn’t have that many official stores in China, but I see them everywhere, so I think a lot of them are fake.  Anyway, they sell an entry-level 13” MacBook Pro for 8400 RMB, which is a little over 1300 USD.  In the USA, you could get that for probably $1000 – 1100, so that means buying a Mac in China is around 25% more expensive.  Yikes!  That’s also why some Chinese people ask their friends in America to bring them Apple products when they visit because it’s so much cheaper in America.  Saving 250 USD is around 1600 RMB – not a small amount!

On the second floor, they mostly sell laptops.  Again, I was approached by 2398523957129038 people asking me to go look at their stuff, so I ended just telling them all that I didn’t bring any money, which seemed to work.  The laptops in China are pretty much like the Macs, in that the price is really jacked up.  The PCs usually have a price increase of %15 – 20.  I really like having a bunch of computer monitors, so I asked a guy how much they sell for in China.  The price of a nice LED monitor is actually pretty comparable to those in the United States.  I also noticed HP had a slightly different strategy of getting customers to visit: every single HP store had an attractive girl dressed up in an HP outfit!  But I feel like many companies or stores in China do this…

The third floor was really cool.  It was mostly about computer hardware.  I asked around (or rather they went up to me and told me) to see how much motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc. cost in China.  Most of them were pretty close to the prices in the USA, although slightly on the expensive side.  However, one guy told me that an i5 CPU was for 3000 RMB, which is like 450 USD – a total rip-off!

This i5-3570K is a pretty high-end i5 CPU, but it's only $204.99

This i7-2500K, which is better than the i5, sell for $289.99

Also, it was funny because I’d ask them a lot of questions regarding the specifications of the stuff they had, and they’d ask me if I was Korean.  I really don’t know why, considering that I look nothing like a Korean, but I got the hint that they think the general Chinese population is not as good with computers as the Koreans.  My not-too-awesome Chinese probably also led them to think that I wasn’t Chinese!

 

Later I was told that you can haggle over the prices to bring them down to reasonable levels, but it might be really difficult to get them down to American price levels, especially for me – a foreigner!  I want to go back to have a look around and maybe buy a cheap monitor, but then I’ll have the new problem of figuring out what’s real and what’s not!

I want something like this...