Flood of Chinese scalpers too much for Apple to handle
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I never put Apple and huangniu (scalpers, or literally, yellow ox) together.
Apple is a massively successful money-making enterprise with stunning but simple designs, whereas the word huangniu reminds me of omnipresent figures camping overnight at train stations, buying all the tickets and robbing me of the right to go home during the national holidays.
But corporate capitalism and private enterprise ended up meeting on September 29, when Beijing's Apple flagship store at Sanlitun removed the iPhone 4 sales limit of two per customer.
Since the store was open around 7:30 am, huangniu put on a battle as sudden as a lightening. Many of them were seen leaving with 20 to 30 boxed iPhone 4s lurking just outside the store and trying to sell to passers-by. The store's products were soon bought up.
The real buyers started to get furious, and some quarreled with the sales people while others had a fight with the scalpers. Policemen even came to clear up the chaos.
A notice saying "temporarily closed" was put on the door. Apple was originally seeking to play its routine market strategy of putting on a scene where demand drastically surpasses supply. But the company clearly overplayed. Apple underestimated China's scalpers and dealt a blow to its own image just four days after the iPhone 4's launch.
This isn't an unfamiliar story for the Chinese public. Scalpers fill up news coverage before each Spring Festival, and regularly draw national discussion of ways of coping with them, but there doesn't seem to be an easy solution for this headache.
Huangniu have become an ordinary part of society, as demand still outstrips supply for many popular or needed items, from train tickets to hospital booking tickets.
Apple probably hates these huangniu. So did I, at first. Throughout the National Day holidays, the only way to get a contract-free iPhone 4 on the mainland seemed to be to go to a scalper and pay him an extra 700 yuan ($105) over the listed price. The despair and anger of those genuine customers was exactly the way I felt when I stood before a train ticket window but couldn't get one sleeper ticket.
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