OK. Now what's he
prattling on about.
First, please note, this is NOT a political commentary. Maybe more of an open letter to explain that
everyone has a stance on trading with the Chinese. "There's a huge trade imbalance." "They steal our intellectual
property." "They want to
destroy us." "They don't buy
anything of value from us." Hit a
search engine and you'll find all sorts of reasons to trade and to not trade
with China.
Currently, we're in a trade skirmish. Call it a war if you wanna. It has to do with
tariffs and our trying to get some reasonable balance of trade. I'd go on but I've already buried the lede,
as usual.
It's the bottom line.
We have nothing to worry about.
h-Why? h-Why, you
say? It's a simple answer: The Chinese haven't a clue about real world
economics or customer service. My proof?
 |
| Jack Ma (Courtesy, CNBC) |
A couple of years back, I registered with Jack Ma's*
Alibaba. Never bought anything but
looked at various pieces of electronic equipment and their manufacture in
China. I was always afraid of the
"not quite" - like an EIA connection that's "not quite" 3
1/8" or a length of Cat5E line that was "not quite" wound
properly. Too many hassles. I got some promos from them [him] but not
much else. However, I did do a followup registration with
AliExpress, the so-called consumer-driven arm of Jack Ma's business.
Well, this past Tuesday, I realized that a particular item I
was looking for was, in fact, manufactured in China. I thought I'd give AliExpress a try. Good to have some experience should a vendor
or client talk about the service.
If you think Alicia Silverstone was clueless, go to
AliExpress. Sign in, if you want
to. Fill your cart with any number of
items, many of which are really good buys since the US markup (not tariff,
markup) is pretty high.
If you have my experience, you'll see that there's a clock
telling you that the real sale will start in x days/hours. Wait till then and you can save a great deal
of money. For me it was about $40 on
$203 worth of purchases. And given that
those purchases would have totaled about $350 had I purchased from US
middlepeople, it was a great deal.
So I clicked on all the coupons to redeem them. They all said "added" except one
which I finally figured out. Then it sat
for 3 days till Friday AM. I logged back
in. Had to jump thru all of the hoops
but it did pull up my list. So far so
good.
Left hand corner?
Clock said 00:00:00 to sale. Even
better. Once again, I clicked the
coupons. Once again they were
added. Then clicked on
"Buy". Oops. Can only buy one item. Hmmmmmm.
Well, that's OK, maybe that's the right thing to do anyway. See how this thing drives.
Picked one item that exceed its coupon minimum. Bought it...almost. In the checkout, it asked for the usual name,
address, etc. but, in this case, as you would expect, "Country."
Click in the box. No
dropdown. OK. I can play this game. Entered "US" and it went blank with
a red "enter country" above it.
Next try? "USA". Nope.
Then, of course, "United States of America". No sir-ee.
I know. I'll try Edge
instead of Firefox. Same experience.
Went looking for online help. If you scour the AliExpress site, you will
eventually get to a chat. (Holy
cow. I'm looking into the screen and I
can see eyes rolling to the ceiling.) I
opened "Eva". Eva was nice
enough to tell me that she/he (I don't know what his/her pronouns are) was busy
with someone else and would be along shortly.
Eventually she showed up. I explained everything and she
asked if I could send a screen shot. I
did. She recommended that I enter
"other" in the country slot.
Didn't work. Then she asked me to
clear the browser cache and cookies. I
reminded her that that would cost me a lot of time down the road with certain
accounts I have. She didn't get
that.
Regardless, I went ahead.
Nothing. I told her that neither
Edge nor Firefox would show the dropdown.
Then the other 鞋子 dropped.
"Please download and install Incognito browser."
Whaaaaaat?
"Excuse me. Are you telling
me that Jack Ma has had a system designed that only works with Google and
Incognito?"
"Please download Incognito."
"I cannot"
"Here is the link."
"No. I cannot
because I will not put a Google browser on any machine I have control
over."
"You will need Incognito browser."
"I think I can let you go help someone else. Please do us both a favor and send a copy of
this email to Jack Ma."
So, we're safe. If
Jack Ma hasn’t figured it out, he soon will…he built it but we ain't comin'.
Now, granted, this is an inexact analysis. But the principle is there. Of course, if they do figure it out, then we throw the fickleness of American consumers at them. That'll buy us another 50 years.
* I'm using what I believe to be his full name since I'm not
sure if he's Westernized or if Ma is actually his pronome
