Dave Meleney leaves a superb comment to this post. Read it!:
Wow!
Shopping in China has been changing rapidly, a full openness to WalMart and Home Depot will send it all into hyperspeed. When I was doing small home repairs there 15 years ago I had to go to an amazing number of shops to get a few plumbing items. Most stores were manned by listless government employees who'd often say: "Mayo" (we don't have any) to any request, even when the goods were right in front of you. And where the private stores were very eager to please but wouldn't think of western habits like standing behind their products. Someone spending half a years salary on a bike better check it out very, very carefully...
Now they are jumping fully into a competitive model where exchange doesn't require establishing personal relationships, where every ounce of fat is constantly being pared from the distribution process, and where the producer knows what products left the store shelves that very night.
A culture that has largely skipped the wired phone and gone straight to cell technology, that is producing several times the engineering graduates of any other country in the world, and that now is mainlining Sam Walton's urgently efficient ethos is soon going to be coming up with hi tech innovations that revolutionize the way our children live. Instead of getting SARS and new forms of flu from Guangdong province, we'll be getting cutting edge biotechnology and cars that don't have accidents. No wonder that Ford Motor and Kay Jewelry, are starting to worry that WalMart may do to them what it did to Toys-R-Us. The true nature of the revolution is starting to become more evident.
Posted by Kevin on December, 23 2004 at 12:03 PM
