We met a "DaiGou" in Japan, why do they frustrate me? (Patreon)

Daigou (代购) Is slang for a person or job (it can be a noun or a verb) who basically buys desirable goods overseas usually for tax or quality reasons and then sends said goods back to China putting on a markup and making a living doing this.

The sorts of people that end up being daigou are usually overseas Chinese students, bored family members of someone living overseas or just tourists who fund their travels doing this rather dodgey and grey area job.

I need to set the scene here, Sasha really wanted to buy a particular Japanese brand of raincoat that is very popular in China at the moment but every store we visited in Tokyo was completely sold out of S size raincoats (which is odd since Japanese women and Chinese women are usually petite and S size should be readily available), but by the time we had checked the fifth store (each time we travelled to a new area, we would check the local stores that carried the raincoat) we were truly baffled as there were no S size raincoats to be found. As we were leaving Sasha overheard a Chinese woman talking to the staff asking if they had the raincoats she had asked them to put behind the counter for her and sure enough there was a stack of S size raincoats, the entire stock that the shop was carrying waiting for her behind the counter. Sasha talked to her and she was very friendly, a student studying in Tokyo and she agreed to let Sasha have one of them which was of course a nice gesture (unusual for daigou). The mystery was solved! Daigou have obviously been running around to all of the shops carrying this currently popular brand of raincoat so that they can snap them all up and send them back to China for profit... Similar to what happens to Milk Powder (baby formula) in Australia and other countries. Sasha added the daigou on wechat and we had a laugh when we saw pictures of her hotel floor on her wechat moments of all of the products she had purchased the next day to send back to China, Daigou take these photos to prove that they're sending the real products and not local made Chinese knock-offs.

This take everything and leave nothing for anyone else MO is what really bugs me about daigou.

If you visit large "Tax free" stores like DonQiote in Japan you'll see hundreds of daigou loading up baskets of goods and in fact I was appauled to see a middle aged Chinese woman spot a shelf of lipsticks on sale and she arm shovelled every last one into her basket... This was back in 2016 and I didn't have the foresight to film it.... needless to say I'm not a fan of this profession.

If what you see here on this Daigou's hotel floor is indicative of a single day's haul, I can't imagine just how many goods she's shipping back to China every month. It must be said that it's a hell of a lot of work and logistics for what I'm guessing is a fairly low profit margin, but Chinese people are very industrious and hard working and I've seen people spend inordinate amounts of time doing something that will in the end earn them very little, this is a cultural difference for sure, time does not equal money in China, time is free and money equals money, this comes from the fact that labour is never factored into any service here and most probably due to the massive population, there will always be someone else willing to do the job if you don't.

As much as it frustrates me, the only laws that are being broken are the fact that they're slipping these goods into China using crafty ways to avoid paying tax and they are probably doing something that constitutes trade/work/business on a student or travel visa (which is probably incorrect). Nothing big enough to get upset about, but what does bug me is their mercenary approach, I do hope that one day they'll develop a conscience and a little consideration for others along the way, and then perhaps the Hong Kong slang term for daigou "locusts" will finally be inappropriate.

- Stay Awesome!

SerpentZA