Trader Zhou’s

It is pretty well known that since China has opened up to the west, Chinese have become ardent consumers. However, their approach to consumption is certainly different from the approach of their western counterparts. To understand the Chinese brand of consumerism, imagine how a starved dog would behave when set loose in a butcher’s shop. Whether presented with a premium filet or the sordid leftovers, you can be sure that it would indulge with equal fervor. Similarly, the Chinese are so excited by the prospect of anything remotely western that they don’t really care whether it is real, or even good. They actually don’t even seem to care if it is western or not, as long as it looks western. The thing is, they only seem to care about looking like they have enough money to buy expensive things. Whether something is expensive or not is beside the point as long as it looks like it might have been.

Also beside the point is why something might be expensive in the first place. Ignoring the fact that most luxury goods are also selling the name, they usually have better design and quality to support the name. However, the Chinese are certainly not concerned about that. Nope, they’re just worried about the status symbol. The only thing is, everyone knows that everything is cheap and fake, so there is no way that anyone actually thinks anyone else’s ‘Armani’ T-shirt is authentic. Fortunately for the knock offs, they’re still more expensive than they would be without the labels, and thus, owning an expensive cheap knock off is the sheik thing to do in China. In the US, there is a popular resentment towards the name brand mark up. Here, that name brand mark up is exactly why people spend their money on those brands. Even more extreme, they seem to want to pay the mark up because they want to prove that they can. The same could be said of US consumers, however the difference is in the pervasiveness of the mentality.

The result is a huge population of people wearing Louis Vuitton knock offs, treating Pizza Hut like an upscale fine dining establishment, and talking on cheap cell phones that are designed to look expensive in that way only cheap plastic shit from Wal-Mart can. All this in an effort to emulate what the Chinese perceive as western or ‘American’, when if they did the same thing in America, people would just laugh at them. I still can’t help but smile at the irony.

And now we get to the most wonderful bit of Chinglish I’ve seen to date and the inspiration for this post, Trader Zhou’s:

Trader Zhou's, selling premium wines since...sometime after Trader Joe's was started.

As you may have guessed, ‘Zh’ in Pinyin (the phonetic spelling of Chinese) is pronounced like a ‘J’ in English, and upon seeing, this I nearly wet myself. It’s just a little too absurd. They even came close to the right font, and there is no way that Trader Joe’s is recognizable enough in Dalian that this store benefits significantly from the name, much less the font. There is a Trader Joe’s in Beijing, but given that Beijing is massive, and very few Dalian tourists would have found it, I’m betting that no one in Dalian has heard of it. So, the fact that this store exists is a testament to how absurdly committed to emulating western culture the Chinese can be. Even when there is no benefit from it, people go for the western rip off. That, or the owner has an awesome sense of humor and a very select audience. I hope for the latter considering that this is a wine store conspicuously lacking in Two Buck Chuck.