Hong Kong,
China
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Shopping in Hong Kong can be great fun. There are some good bargains to be had if you know what you are doing, what you want and how much it should cost. Go prepared and take an hour or two to look around before you buy anything. I was prepared and still managed to get slightly ripped off by a few assholes at Level-One Computer store, Shop 206 2nd Floor in the Mong Kok Computer Center. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM LEVEL-ONE COMPUTERS!!! They will overcharge you as much as they possibly can. The staff is full of dishonest, smooth talking, hard selling sales people that will pressure you into buying from them. I usually don't fall for this kind of bull, but when I walked in, I knew exactly what I wanted and the price that I wanted to pay for it. I was going to get 1GB or 2GB of RAM and the price I wanted to pay was 133HKD or 203HKD. Their listed price was 148HKD and 290HKD. They came down to 130 on 1GB without much struggle, but wouldn't come below 250HKD for 2GB. I took the 1GB so I could focus on helping my buddy buy a new laptop. I figured that in a place with 3 floors of computer stuff that the price would be about the same everywhere and I had already gotten better than the price I wanted to pay. Unfortunately, the price of memory drops virtually on a daily basis and the prices that I got the week before were already out of date. By the time I got to the 3rd floor, I saw the listed prices were 109 and 185. I was pissed because I could really use a 2GB for my computer. So I went back down to them to see if they would upgrade my chip to a 2GB for a total of 185 and even went up to 200, but they still refused. I tried asking them nicely, but they wouldn't budge. So every time someone took interest in their products, I raised my voice a bit and asked them to be better business people and not overcharge their customers. Of course, they couldn't do any business while I was there so they started to get angry and threatened to call the cops. I said fine, I'm just standing here, in front of the store checking out your products to see if I can exchange my chip for something more useful. After losing a few more customers, they called the cops. I laughed because I wasn't doing anything wrong and if no one was going to buy anything from them with an irate customer standing in the store front, who the H3LL in their right mind would buy something from a store with cops in there.
The Man took both sides of the story and they advised me that there was nothing that they could do for me. I knew that, but I said I was just shopping and they couldn't tell me that I couldn't shop there. I gave them one last shot to give me what I wanted, but they refused so I said very loudly in Cantonese directed to everyone on the floor, "fine, if you want to be bastards and rip off your customers, I hope no one will buy from your store!" "All of your things here are overpriced!" and walked away. I went back 2 more times later in the day before I left and said very quietly to potential customers that it was cheaper upstairs as I walked by. The impact of that was small, but I hope that people searching for Buying Tips in Hong Kong find this posting and know NOT TO BUY from Level-One Computer, Shop 206 2nd Floor Mong Kok Computer Center. Since I've just reached 25,000 hits on my site, I hope it at least impacts their business by a little bit.
