the 06/17/2008

Losing Your Wallet in Russia

lady leather jackets Now that the leather jacket had passed the preliminary fire test,it was necessary to try the damn thing on. But I was running latefor work, as usual, so I told the woman "another day."Before I could make my grand escape she was already holding thejacket out in front of me, like a toreador teasing the bull. Imuttered a mild obscenity, dropped my bag, and slipped my arms intothe unidentifiable animal skin. Then the woman held up a longmirror for me, while offering a barrage of kindly compliments, notone of them remotely true. I gazed at my reflection and was shocked: A total stranger - a cross between a skinny Mafia boss and theMatrix kid - was leering back at me. "Cool, a new me," I reflected in my morning stupor."Just what I need." I inquired about the price and she shot back: "2,500rubles." "Sorry," I said, removing the jacket. "That's wayout of my ballpark." But in her mind, the coat was already sold; it was only a matter ofhammering out an agreeable price. She was so confident, in fact,that she was already folding up the coat to stuff into the derigueur plastic bag. Everything was happening so fast that I found myselfcounter-offering her original price: "2,000 rubles," Isaid. She feigned pain by contorting her facial features, explaining thatshe would only break even on the sale at such a price. I said sorry, shrugged my shoulders, and started to walk away fromthe table. "Okay, okay," she said. "Two thousand rubles, as yousay." "No," I said, sensing her sudden desperation. "Ireally can't, it's just too much." "Okay sir, 1,500 rubles, but I tell you I will lose money onsuch a price." Ah, the thrill of the Russian bazaar. I love it! What couldpossibly compare to the exhilaration of bargaining for your ownleather, besides actually hunting down the animal on your own? Infact, I think it is a great loss that consumers cannot walk intoMacy's or Harrod's and negotiate with the sales ladies. Haggling isa contest, an ancient art, a card game where buyer and seller bluffeach other until both sides finally show their cards. And after thebattle both sides feel victorious: the shopper feels like they gota hard-won bargain (even if he didn't), while the sales person canfeel a sense of pride about being a real participant in the sale. When I arrived home with my new leather jacket, I pulled it out ofthe bag and uttered another expletive. I put it on and looked inthe mirror and realized that I looked ridiculous. There are peoplewho can wear full-length black leather coats and there are thosewho can't. At best, I can don the trench coat in my moments ofboredom and run around the house in slow motion with the stereoblasting the Matrix soundtrack, as I blow away imaginary Mr. Smithswith my imaginary shotgun. This is certainly not the first time a Russian sales person hassweet-talked me into buying something I did not need. Thisunderlines one of the great paradoxes about Russia: it is home tofantastic sales people, maybe even the best in the world. In the West, our sales people have been spoon-fed stupid advicefrom pimply business-school grads who have never experienced thereal world. Slogans like "the consumer is king," and"the consumer is always right," and other such tediouscrap, immediately greet shoppers when they walk into stores, givingshoppers ego trips. In Russia, as with so many other things, thevery opposite is true. The customer is an individual that needssomething that the seller has, therefore, he - the buyer - ispractically an object of scorn and derision. After all, why shouldthe seller, the person with all of the goodies, be nice to a personwho does not have the goodies? Yes, the customer may have themoney, but so does everybody else. If you don't want to buy, theRussian seller seems to say, somebody else will, so you betterhurry up, buddy, and make a decision. I suppose this mentality stretches back into the Soviet period whenthe seller, the merchant, really was a king. Of course these peopleled very dangerous lives (indeed, as all kings do), since the ideaof profiting from the buying and selling of "soul-crushingthings" was a big no-no for the communists. But everybody -from the top ranks of the Communist party, to the lower tier of thetoiling workers - wanted and needed stuff. This put the sellers,especially during the early days of perestroika, into positions ofgreat influence. When you mix this Soviet mentality with the fact that Russians wereborn with silver tongues, which have been brought to a dangerousedge from reciting Pushkin poems, my advice is: don't let yourguard down when haggling in Russia, a place where a fool and hismoney are quickly parted. By Robert Bridge