If you want to go shopping in Vietnam, you are going to have to learn to haggle.
If the business of haggling seems essentially dishonest, or if in practice it makes your blood boil, then - don't go shopping in Vietnam. Or maybe don't go to Vietnam full-stop. Or, if you absolutely must go and you really want to go shopping, then go with some Vietnamese friends and get them to buy your stuff for you, preferably when you're out of eyeshot of the vendor.
For your day-to-day needs, haggling in Vietnam can, sort of, be avoided. If it's toothpaste you want to buy, then go to a supermarket. If it's a tv, then go to a big electronics retailer. In both places a fixed price will be displayed on the item, so there'll be no need to eyeball a salesman at close range or put up with him craftily misunderstanding everything you say about payment and price.
However in most locations where buying and selling occurs, haggling can't be avoided. It can't be avoided at markets. It can't be avoided at small shops. And it definitely can't be avoided when organising a ride with a motorbike taxi-driver (aka a Hondaman) or being fined by the police for a minor (or imaginary) traffic violation.
If a Vietnamese person, friend or foe, tells you a price that you know is a lot more than the going Vietnamese price, it doesn't always mean they are trying to rip you off. They might think of it more as an invitation to start haggling; and they almost certainly assume that because they're comfortable with haggling, then the rest of the world must be too. So be prepared, above all with the facts - make sure you have a rough idea what the going Vietnamese price is and consider beforehand how much you're willing to pay: that is, how much you're realistically willing to cop, not how much you'd like to pay in some sort of Vietnamese-themed fantasy land of fairytale cheapness. Last off all, take a deep breath and - put in an opening bid.
Whatever you do, don't take the inflated prices as a personal affront; they are offered to all Western tourists and to most Vietnamese who aren't regular customers as well.
Put in your opening bid - that's right: come back at the vendor with a price that is below the going price and then try to get things to come up to a rough median. And if the vendor won't wear the rough median? Then walk away with nary an angry word. This will hopefully have an instant effect: the vendor will consent to begin haggling from scratch. If you're lucky, the Hondaman who has just been demanding $10 to drive you 1km down the road will come chasing after you, offering a much better price because in reality he needs the fare. Your stiff resistance to his ludicrously inflated price has convinced him that you have a grip on reality too.
Remember, last of all, that successful haggling takes patience. There's no way you're going to get a fair price out of a regular Vietnamese street vendor and be on your way in 30 seconds. More than that, successful haggling requires an ability to be (in Western terms) a little bit shameless. Street vendors who feel you're getting the price down too close to the going Vietnamese price will surely try to mobilize their best weapon of attack - the Western buyer's sense of cultural embarrassment. This is usually fairly easy to do - upon hearing your latest, perfectly reasonable offer, the vendor will start shrieking in Vietnamese as if you're trying to perpetrate a crime. (This usually has a multiplier effect: other street vendors and various other bystanders come running to the scene and some of them start shrieking too.)
Now your haggling skills are being severely tested. Ignore the bystanders and repeat the offer you just made (the one that started off the amateur theatrics). Don't be afraid to raise your voice and use your hands.
Doesn't sound too difficult? Does it even sound that different from the sorts of bargaining that Westerners are perfectly happy to enter into over house prices or salary packages? Let's not pretend that Western economic ethics are all that different, let alone more high-minded, than Vietnamese economic ethics. (Let's also not forget that in Mediterranean Europe haggling is a habit, or a past-time, just like in Vietnam.)
Across the board, you might find that Vietnamese go in for moderately sharper sales practices than Westerners. Plenty of Vietnamese see outright lying about their products and services as legitimate if it helps them to make a living under difficult conditions - and normal economic conditions in Vietnam are tough. Vietnamese real estate agents, for example, tend to be real bottom feeders - even worse than what you get on the East Coast of Australia and the West Coast of the US. No matter how specific you are about what you're looking for, most will show you anything they have on the books, lie about its price and features, then try to heavy you into renting it.
But whether this kind of behaviour suggests that Vietnamese, when operating in market places, are more comfortable than Westerners with commercial dishonesty is arguable even at the best of times. In the West, you might say, there's a serious possibility that commercial rip-offs will be exposed by the media; there are government agencies and consumer advocates whose job is to investigate complaints and, in the case of serious fraudulence, there's the law. None of them are foolproof ways of preventing rip-offs. But they probably strike fear into the hearts of many potential rip-off merchants.
The set-up in Vietnam is a bit different. The Vietnamese press sometimes reports major rip-offs that have obvious effects on the health of the general public or lead to the financial ruination of war widows. But with less institutional arrangements in place to alert the world to the activities of ripoff merchants, there are inevitably quite a few more ripoffs. Buyer be doubly beware.
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Markets, according to some guidebooks, are a beautiful and lively manifestation of Vietnamese urban culture. But don't go to them if artificially inflated prices are going to get on your nerves. Often the best thing to do at a Vietnamese market is just wander and look. If it's the meat section of the market you're visiting, leave any moral presuppositions you have about food and food preparation at the entrance. The Vietnamese sell fish and poultry live. They also sell the internal organs of beasts and fowls by the bucket:
In big Vietnamese cities there are two types of market - the tourist attractions selling snacks and knick-knacks:
and the suburban places that cater mainly to locals:
You can expect to have the sh*t bargained out of you in both locations unless you know what you're doing.
Don't be fooled by Western blog material about the authenticity of Vietnamese markets. The picturesque poverty and bad smells often hide some unlikely stories. The hearty middle-aged women sitting on miniature plastic stools slicing up pork chops, with blood up to their elbows, can be expert price gougers, forcing primary producers to sell for a song and end users to pay three times over. As messy and poor as the denizens of a Vietnamese market can look, their hard labour often brings in 10 times the wage of lowly government officials. All Vietnamese market goers know this - and use it to inform their haggling practices.
Lastly, don't think you can escape the necessity of haggling if, stepping out of the market, you go for a walk along one of those classic rows of Vietnamese shops that are all selling the same thing.
To newcomers, they represent one of the economic mysteries of Vietnamese life; intuitively, you'd think it was poor business strategy to have all the fan-shops or lock-shops in a city set up next to each other with nothing at all to differentiate product-range. Apparently, the arrangement works for the Vietnamese though. (Apparently the idea is that if everyone in a city knows where all the fan-shops are then there'll be more sales of fans than there would have been if there were one fan shop in every district.)
The arrangement doesn't work so well for Westerners in search of bargains. As the prospective owner of a new fan - and a competent haggler capable of putting into practice all of the wise advice contained in this blog-entry - you might think you could get one of the fan shops to sneak a sale off its competitors by undercutting them on price. Surely such markets work in the buyer's favour?
Not if there's solid collusion between the fan shops. With a tacit agreement on price in place along the fan-strip, everyone's free to charge you what they like, no matter how good your haggling skills are.
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That might be the rough deal as far as haggling goes, but what about Vietnamese attitudes to money in general? What you'll probably notice when you first come to Vietnam is how much Vietnamese like to talk about money. Generally speaking, it isn't considered rude to talk about how much money you have or how much you paid for stuff. Among Vietnamese nouveau riche it's considered compulsory, as it is among nouveau riche people pretty much everywhere in the world.
To open a conversation with a stranger, in Australia people start by asking what job the other guy does. As a follow up, you ask what suburb he lives in - which of course is code for how much money he has. (In Melbourne of course you also ask what school the other guy went to - which is code for how much money his parents have.)
All this is completely different in Vietnam, where you will be asked openly by complete strangers about four things: how old you are, whether you are married, how tall you are in centimetres and - how much money you earn per month. (In everyday Vietnamese: "Một tháng b'nhiêu?")
If a Vietnamese stranger asks you this last question, it doesn't mean he is sizing up how much money he can take you for. (Occasionally it might mean that.) In Vietnam, asking a stranger about his income is just a way of showing friendly interest; it's actually an attempt to be polite, rather than aninfringement against etiquette.
Of course, there are more and more Westerners in this world who don't have any sort of old-fashioned middle-class inhibitions when it comes to talking about money. As far as I could tell from my most recent trip back to Sydney, the favourite topics of conversation in middle Australia nowadays, in descending order of interest, are how much people pay for their (a) houses, (b) cars (c) designer jockstraps (d) pets' physio. I'm guessing thing are equally grim in most corners of the Western world.
Put it this way. If, as a Westerner, you grew up in the sort of middle class home where mentioning the price of things or asking people how much they earn was considered boorish - then you're in for a shock in Vietnam.
Put the shock in cultural context. Educated middle-class Vietnamese tend to know that Westerners are uncomfortable talking about certain details of their lives. However there are plenty of not-so-middle class Vietnamese who will ask you straight up about the contents of your bank account or your weight in kilos. Don't hold it against them; most of them are fully convinced that they're being the most amiable people in the world.
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