Ordinary Gweilo

Saturday’s SCMP had a short news story quoting Chief Secretary Henry Tang Ying-yen as saying that he would like “to see no more roaming charges when people travel between Hong Kong and Guangdong.”  Well, wouldn’t we all?  However, it’s probably not going to happen:

An industry source reacted strongly to Mr Tang’s suggestion, saying: “Telecom is a competitive market. The government should not intervene in how the private sector does its business; it will set a dangerous precedent.

“Roaming involves costs: that is why there are roaming charges. Let the market set the prices.”

I think the reporter may have slightly mis-heard, because what the spokesman actually said was “roaming involves high profits and we want to keep hold of them for as long as we can”.   Costs?  What costs?

In Europe mobile phone companies are being forced to reduce roaming charges on the basis that the European Union is supposed to be a single market, and to that end they have already abolished border controls between most of the member countries (excluding the UK).  Meanwhile, although Hong Kong is part of China we still have a border crossing (well, two actually) – and different phone companies.  

The thing with roaming is that it’s easy enough to avoid paying the excessive charges, but it’s a bit fiddly (two phones, or one phone which takes two SIM cards, helps here), and if you don’t expect everyone to remember two numbers you need to subscribe to a separate service to re-direct calls (which is cheaper than roaming but more expensive than local calls).  Or there is at least one mobile phone company offering a dual SIM card, and I’m sure there are other solutions I’ve never heard about.

So basically the only people paying roaming charges are those who either don’t know the alternatives or can’t be bothered with them.  And presumably there are enough of them to make it a profitable business for phone companies on both sides of the border.   

Today’s Sunday Morning Post has a large photograph of a supermarket shelf, to illustrate the fact that all the price labels are yellow.  Yes, really.

Short history lesson.  Until a couple of years ago, ParknShop (for it is them) used to have mainly white labels, reserving yellow for special prices.  Except that “special” would include bogus discounts and trivial reductions (was $83.70, now $83.60), and so was almost meaningless.

Then they introduced “Everyday Low Prices” and changed all their price labels to yellow regardless of whether the price was “special” or normal.  This was presumably intended to bamboozle the more dim-witted shopper who had been brain-washed into believing that yellow labels denoted special prices.  The SCMP story (Supermarkets blur the line in ‘promotions’) seems to suggest that it may have worked: 

When approached yesterday, shoppers said they had noticed more yellow tags, but did not realise the old labels had disappeared. Isabella Tsun, shopping in a ParknShop store, looked sceptical when told the white price labels had been removed.

“Are there really no more white tags?” she asked.  Ms Tsun and her friend said they were always on the lookout for yellow labels as a sign of special offers.

Another shopper, Mani Lam, wanted the white labels back and said the Consumer Council should push the supermarkets to reuse the traditional labels. “Normal prices should be labelled in white,” she said.

A third customer, Magdalene Leung, said she did not realise products with the “every day low price” slogan were not necessarily cheaper.  Ms Leung said she used to peep behind the yellow tags to see what was on the white ones so she could “check if there is truly a difference between the two”.

They’re tricking you!  The yellow labels never meant much, and now they mean nothing. 

A Wellcome spokeswoman said they could not pinpoint exactly when the labels were replaced, but the reason was that coloured ones were more eye-catching, and it was more environmentally friendly to use just one type.

How can it possibly be more environmentally friendly to print price labels on yellow paper rather than white?  The Post seems to have missed the point with their sub-heading:

Price comparisons made difficult as white tags quietly give way to yellow ones

The whole point here is that supermarkets in Hong Kong are not bound by any consumer protection laws (such as apply in the UK and Australia), and so they take full advantage of this by increasing and decreasing prices to create the impression of price reductions.  Changing the colour of the label is a trivial matter compared to their practice of increasing prices and claiming they have reduced them.  

I think it’s time for some more different coloured labels.  Maybe green for ‘higher price Friday’ or blue for ‘temporary price hike’ or purple for ‘the same price as Wellcome’.  

Supermarkets in Hong Kong are constantly trying to trick their customers with bogus discounts.  It's not exactly news, but yesterday's Consumer Council report provides confirmation of something that most people in Hong Kong must have noticed.

I think we're all used to those ridiculous yellow labels in ParknShop that advertise so-called "discounts" that bear no relation to reality, but what is striking is how brazen they are about this – one example given in the report is that both Wellcome and ParknShop increased the price of San Miguel from HK$5.90 to HK$6.50 and then immediately had a special offer at HK$12.30 for 2 (yes, that's right, a 4% increase ).  Then when the promotion ended, the price changed to HK$6.10. 

They do this all the time, presumably hoping that customers will forget how much they paid last week, and of course in the UK it would be illegal (retailers have to be able to prove that the item was previously sold at the higher price, and not just for one day).

Even more bizzarely, supermarkets apparently charge more on Fridays (Chain store 'bargains' in fact dearer – subscription required):

Some 207 items in ParknShop – or 71.9 per cent – were most expensive on Fridays, while 158 items in Wellcome – or 54.9 per cent – cost the most on the day. The finding was based on the average price of the same item on the 21 Fridays in the survey period.

Most items were cheapest on Thursdays – 52.4 per cent of them  in ParknShop and 47.6 per cent in Wellcome.

The real problem here is lack of competition. Carrefour struggled to find sites, and key suppliers refused to do business with them because their prices were too low.  Without any competition laws, the power of the big two supermarket chains is preserved and oligopoly lives to fight another day.  That seems to have been enough to scare off Wal-Mart and Tesco.

The general rule in Hong Kong is that your local shopping centre(s) will only have a ParknShop or a Wellcome (or both, though given the way they 'compete' with each by charging the same prices, that hardly makes any difference). Yes, there are a few CRC supermarkets (mainly clustered in a few areas), but they seem to be uninspiring copies of Wellcome. 

If you're lucky you may also have some local shops or a wet market, or there's City Super, who don't even bother pretending their prices are low.  But no competition for Wellcome and ParknShop in the mass market, unfortunately.