Feb 4th, 2009 - Cell Phone Mall

Today my wife wanted to go out and buy a cell phone. Sounded simple enough, so I agreed to come along. Back home in Vancouver, that would entail walking up to a little kiosk at the mall, pointing to the phone you want, then paying for & activating it and away you go! Not in China. Here, you have to pass through Cellular Armageddon first.

In my mind, I pictured going to the little kiosk. In actuality, we went to the Big Box Store of cellular phones. It was kind of like a small city formed when man and cell phone joined forces to take over the free world. I call it Cellular Planet. I'm not sure what it's actually called; I couldn't read the sign.

At Cellular Planet, there are 4 floors of cell phone madness, and in order to buy a phone, you have to visit all 4 floors. At first, we talked toa greeter on the first floor. It was sort of a Universal Foyer, in that it was the size of a small universe. The greeter told us to go up to the second floor where we were shown a few basic models, then they sent us up to the 3rd floor, where all hell was breaking lose. Picture it like in the movies when they show stock brokers on Wall Street, yelling "Buy, Sell! Buy Sell!" Except here it was "Buy Cell! Buy Cell!".

At Cellular Planet, every brand of cell phone was represented in spades. There were Nokia stands, Motorolla, LG, Sony, Samsung and a bunch of local brands. Each brand had a big glass counter with every new model on display. There was always a girl in a red vest standing there with a little smiley face pinned on the vest. As you walked past, she'd try to put a cell phone in your hand. I guess by touching it, you've made the decision that you're interested in buying that phone.

I gotta say, these girls were true salespeople. I went to school with a few sales guys in business school, and they couldn't touch these girls. They would smile at the guys, call them over and put a cell phone in their hand. Transaction complete. Since I wasn't buying anything, I sort of hung back by the wall. It was hot as hell in there too. I think that was another sales strategy. They make it unbearably hot so nobody wants to stick around for too long. Basically they want to sell youa phone and get you the hell outta there so they can pile more customers in.

Not to say my wife is a shopaholic, but I think she is a very patient shopper. She'll go up and down the isles, looking at all the different phones, never taking one in her hand but asking tons of questions. She knew in her mind what the best phone in the place was, but she had to do some investigating first. maybe there was some new model that they were hiding out back that you had to give the secret handshake in order to see or something. I get very restless in shopping malls and tend to just hang back and observe. I hate hanging around places like this with all the pushing and shoving and yelling. It reminds me of the Royal Rumble in wrestling.

When someone finds a phone they like, they of course have to test out the speakers to see how loud they will go. This one jackass had the speaker right beside my head when I was sitting down on a stool I scooped from some dude. Of course the jackass held the speaker far away from his own ear to test it. He wouldn't want to deafen himself! What I wouldn't give for a pair of earplugs... Oh well, if I hang around here long enough, I won't need them anyway. I'll be permanently deaf. I wonder if they have those teleprompter phones for the deaf in this place.

Finally my wife had the phone she wanted. Or so she thought. She wanted to try it out first, y'know make a few calls to test the reception etc. Unfortunately at Cellular Planet this is against some Inter-galactic law. You have to pay for the phone first, have them assemble it (you buy it in a million pieces) and then if you don't like it, you have to rewind the tape and go through the whole process in reverse. First they take it all apart, then you take it back to the cashier who gives you a receipt, then you go to customer service and get your cash back. By the way, there is no debit or credit card machines here. All cash. And wads of it. One of these phones costs around 3,000 yuen, which is around $500 CDN.

I almost swallowed my gum when my wife said she wanted to keep looking for another phone. An hour or so later, we had phone #2 all picked out and were back up on the 4th floor. That's where all the assembling goes down. This time there was some sort of raffle-type game going on over on a stage. I half expected the host to pour melted candle wax on the contestants or something, like the game show I saw a couple days ago. Unfortunately they were just giving out gift certificates or something.

Once my wife got phone #2 all assembled, paid for & tested, she went over to a table with a sign that said "Hairdressing". This must be some lost-in-translation thing, I thought. Surely Cellular Planet doesn't give haircuts too! How long have we been in here? Maybe I do need a haircut now. I felt my head. Nope, still short. Actually it was a place to buy accessories and get some sort of radioactive polymer granite coating put on your screen to add a million years to its half-life.

Once that was over, I was sure we were going to leave. But no, there was a FREE GIFT that comes with every cell phone purchase. After another eternity, my wife came back with a tea cup in one hand and her new phone in the other. Boy I thought, at least there is balance in the Cellular Universe. Now let's go catcha cab and get back to our home planet!