I was grocery shopping with my flatmate the other day, going through the list of needs and wants, when she came to oranges.

“Oranges?” I had to ask: “Why not just buy them on the street outside our building?”

“Because they rip me off,” she said. “They see a foreigner and they double the price.” And so she buys most of her fruit and vegetables, nearly all the food in our apartment, actually, at WalMart or one of the big Chinese hypermarkets. Sometimes this means she pays more, sometimes less. But the chains don’t mark up on an individual basis; everyone who shops there is paying the same foreign-goods-in-China price.

I take the opposite route: Nearly every piece of produce I buy is a street transaction. Not saying this is a better, way, just the way I do it. If I pay more, I’m paying for convenience and Chinese practice. If I pay less, so much the better.

There aren’t many foreigners in my neighborhood. I live in a quiet section of Dalian between Peace Plaza and Olympic Square, what I like to call the Bo Xilai part of town, since the former mayor had a thing for planting trees. That was part of the appeal when I moved in: Huge oaks line the sidewalks, hanging out over the street. The trees give the area a calmer feeling and hide the ugly gray facades of the buildings that look much older than they really are.

Any street can turn into a farmer’s market. I haven’t figured out the system that determines where the vendors will park their carts and drop their goods, but it’s never more than a block from my front door. The people selling tend to come from rural parts of Greater Dalian: Pulandian, Wafangdian and slightly farther out. In for a day then back home. I wouldn’t call them migrants in the usual sense, more agricultural commuters.

I don’t know the people who work at WalMart. I shop there, but the experience is much like WalMart anywhere. I get what I need and get out as quickly as possible. It’s hard to be conversational in the frozen food aisle, even about the low, low prices.

But back to my original thought: What’s the proper thing to do here? Take the open market, potentially be ripped off or get food about to rot, with the trade off of paying the guy growing the food (or someone less removed from the process, at least), and getting it closer to home? Or go corporate, get guaranteed quality and the higher price that goes with it, minus a bit of the human interaction? Where do you buy your vegetables?

Just throwing this out there.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 7:20 pm and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.