Never believe everything you read on the internet–nor the signs you read in China.
They don’t sell whales here.
Or semi-pregnant lips.
Goat crackers? It’s not a bad translation. Just a bad idea. I think I’ll stick with Ritz.
This doesn’t sound like a big business idea to me.
China has the best of the worse signage. But the sign that really pissed me off was for marshmallows. Fluffy, puffy overpriced marshmallows.
I needed to bring something to a school potluck last weekend, but didn’t have a pot to cook in. After cooking for a three hundred and fifty hungry mouths every day for a year, I’ve hung up my apron. Actually in China, it’s cheaper to order out than rip open a box of Pig Ear Helper.
Anyway, I got this idea to bring marshmallows to the potluck. Kids love them and my only prep would be ripping open the bag.
So I went to the Chinese version of Costco called Metro and saw a mountain of marshmallows. They weren’t all white, either. There were bags of assorted color marshmallows, like oversized versions of the ones you get in Lucky Charms. On the summit of Mt. Marshmallow, there was a sale sign written in Chinese. One bag of marshmallows was 29 RMB, but if you bought three, you’d get five percent off.
Not exactly a BOGO but a decent deal.
So I grabbed two bags of white and one bag of the pink.
I left the store with my marshmallows and receipt, which I didn’t look at until I got home.
Mistake.
I didn’t receive the special sale price.
You see, I purchased one bag of pink marshmallows and two bags of the white, which voided out the sale price. Just like laundry, you can’t mix colors with the whites
I was pissed. So I went back to the store for my money back.
Now returns in China are a bit tricky. In order to get your money back, you have to bring back an official receipt called a fapiao. It’s more elaborate than the white one I get at Piggly Wiggly, and if you try leaving a store in China without flashing the fapiao to the guards, they might shoot you with their machine gun.
So I go to the customer service desk armed with my fapiao and my marshmallows. But of course, this wasn’t the correct desk. In order to return my marshmallows, I had to go to a different customer service desk as the other side of the store, where I waited behind a lady returning a five gallon jug of soy sauce. I had to wait while the employee filled out a longer than my arm form. But I didn’t get my money back yet. I had to return this form to the first customer service desk.
From there, the manager took the form and escorted me to the check out aisle where I made my marshmallow purchase.
She closed it down, then re-rang up my order for all of my items minus the three bags of marshmallows.
Finally, two hours later, I get my money back: 79 RMB…just shy of eleven bucks.
Dang, for that price, I could get a pot big enough to make some pasta– plus the pasta!
So, I won’t believe sales signs anymore.
And I won’t be ordering Italian takeout from this guy anymore, either.
