Don't Worry About the Chinese

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