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Start with a long history of taking pride in haggling, put up some websites for these hagglers to team up, and what you get is tuangou: a clever form of collective action among consumers.
I saw mention of it just now in an interesting piece by Rob Horning. He is writing about spontaneous collusion and price targeting among companies trying to set consumer against consumer:
But then I wonder if that isn’t the real trap here, the false satisfaction one feels in “beating” the system that has in fact contained you. If I let myself glory in other consumer’s stupidity or ignorance, then I have given myself incentive to keep them ignorant and aligned myself with the retailers rather than those like me, fellow consumers. If everybody follows suit, then we remain collectively ignorant at war with each other rather than with the retailers trying to stratify and bamboozle us. (That’s why tuangou seems strangely appealing in theory.) This war of all against all caters to our individualism and reinforces competitiveness as the default mode of social interaction among peers. Shopping, which seems more and more the primary social activity, becomes a zero-sum game among consumers; we have no reason to cooperate. I gain when you lose. I fly cheaper when you pay more for your ticket. And I can think I’m a deserving winner and you are a deserving loser. This isn’t a big deal with airline tickets, when it comes to our annual salaries or general class prerogatives, it becomes a bigger deal. This kind of thinking leads people to conclude that the poor are simply stupid rather than structurally disadvantaged; being poor, as this Ezra Klein post shows, is matter of having no safety net, no margin for error or bad luck in situations that are already stacked against you due to inherited disadvantages.
So what is tuangou? Well Wikipedia has an entry of course, which says it is “team buying”:
Several people - sometimes friends, but possibly strangers connected over the internet - agree to approach a vendor of a specific product in order to haggle with the proprietor as a group in order to get discounts. The entire group agrees to purchase the same item. The shoppers benefit by paying less, and the business benefits by selling multiple items at once. > >
Wikipedia points to this article from the Economist.
ON AN otherwise quiet Friday afternoon in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, 500 shoppers gather outside a Gome electrical superstore in the downtown district. They arrive en masse at the designated time—June 16th at 4pm—that they had previously agreed online. Several hours later, they emerge clutching boxes, having secured 10-30% discounts on cameras, DVD players and flat-screen televisions. “It was great,” says Fairy Zhang. “We just bought an apartment and this way we can afford nice things for it.” The previous weekend, over 100 locals visited Meizhu Central, a well known furniture outlet, to haggle over the prices of kitchen cabinets and dining-room furniture…
Team buying turns haggling, a tradition in China, into an art-form. That such aggressive consumer behaviour has arisen in a country without much of a consumer economy and weak individual rights is less surprising than it might seem. In the countryside there are more and more organised protests against government corruption and dictatorial landlords, with even poor people using technology like the internet and mobile phones to help. Now their urban, middle-class brethren are adopting their tactics—if only for shopping. However, if China’s economy ever slumps, urban consumers could use their organisational skills to confront the government directly. Beijing might be watching the spread of team buying with trepidation.