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Originally Posted by BigRonW";p="
If you think that the Chinese involved in this scam are really just "wannabe Americans" with slanty-eyes and funny accents... then i suggest you take another look at the "instruction" leaflet that accompanied your player. That leaflet was produced by the BEST English speaker the manufacturer had access to. Do you think they'd EVER been outside of China? if not... then HOW exactly are they supposed to know what YOU consider to be "fair" or unfair"?
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Yes, the Chinese merchants are outside of China all the time. Via their computers. Online sellers, especially eBay merchants, are having to deal with customers all over the world. They know very well what the standards are. You can see that in the examples that I gave in my message, such as my Chinese seller making efforts to negotiate with buyers who were burned by his fake products, in order to eliminate the negatives. If they didn't think it was important to be dishonest or that customers didn't congratulate them on being scammed with fake products, they wouldn't try to eliminate the negatives.
I think you're playing up the "Chinaman Joe" image a little too much. While I don't know where they are getting these rubes to translate their manuals, the Chinese dealers I have seen or dealt with on eBay or online speak and understand English better than the manual translators. Here's a typical example of that, my Chinese seller telling me to shut up already and wait (after I sent him 65 emails over a period of weeks, demanding he respond with an answer as to when he was planning on shipping my fake Sennheisers):
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hi friend:
you won item already send to you ,please waitting it,
cheers
honest xiao
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Me thinking maybe the problem is he didn't understand my English in the 65 emails but NO, he managed to convince me pretty well that he DOES understand English well enough to trade with the foreign devils. He also understands that he's NOT supposed to be selling fake Senn's in the first place. He knows negs are bad for a seller. So after getting neg's about his fake headphones did he stop? No. He continued to sell all kinds of different fakes.
I think you're being way too "PC" with the Chinese in playing down their role in scamming millions of people worldwide with their fake shit. In citing that it may be perfectly acceptable with them to scam people, and that even if they recognize some "wrong" in it, no one cares. Agreed there are vast differences in cultures, including theirs vs. the Western world. That's the crux of my point. In their culture, they don't value honesty in trade very much, and I suppose the government is corrupt enough to let so much of it pass. But some laws are universal, and I'm afraid thievery is one of them.
Do you really think that Chinese sellers have no concept that they may be defrauding people? Do you really think that Chinese customers are mad happy to be defrauded by their fellow countrymen? That if they pay for a 4GB player and get a 256MB player (and the prices of players there are apparently not as cheap as we may think) that they have no problem with that? Or if they buy an Apple iPod and it turns out to be a PhonyPod, its like one's just as good as another, with them? Then read this, about just one counterfeiter jailed in China for selling counterfeit goods:
http://www.chinacsr.com/2006/03/07/3...iled-in-china/
As to your example of the grocers, we may call that "benign scamming" at best. It is not really "scamming" in the traditional sense (to make some information less accessible), and certainly -not- comparable in the least with the counterfeit goods the CHinese are scamming people with. Which is actually against the law. Yes, even in China, as I cited in my source. The reason people may not be clamoring about the grocer "scam" as you call it, is perhaps because they are not aware of that practice. Its certainly the first time I hear of it. Also, it may not be widely practiced. In all the grocers I know of, I haven't seen that happening. The prices are on the shelves of most all the products, and on most of the products themselves.