A Chinese Secret: To Save While Shopping, Shop for Fun

Recent Chinese immigrants in Southern California spend more time and less money shopping for food than their U.S.-born counterparts. As a result, prices in grocery stores serving them tend to be far lower, according to the results of a five-year study by professors at USCThe research focused on grocery stores in Rowland Heights and Brea and found that prices for packaged goods were as much as 18% cheaper for the same brands and sizes and more than 50% cheaper for comparable meats and seafood.

Such factors as economies of scale, food category, individual store policy and time of data collection cannot explain the pricing difference, the study found. “Cultural differences among consumers lead to more price searching and price sensitivity among Chinese consumers, motivating the Chinese supermarkets they patronize to offer lower prices,” sayscoauthor Gerard Tellis, a marketing professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business.

Tellis found Chinese immigrants inspect many more items and take much more time to shop, relying to a greater degree on handling unpackaged food than U.S.-born Americans do. Pinching, smelling and digging through produce remain culturally part of the shopping experience for immigrants.

Differences in shopping behavior cross gender lines. Chinese women and American men devote more time and consideration when shopping than Chinese men and American women.

For recent Chinese immigrants, shopping is leisure-time entertainment. However, Americans view shopping as a task.

“To Americans, shopping was time taken away from more important activities,” Tellis says. “Chinese immigrants cared more about shopping and finding the best value for their money than did similar Americans.”

Shrimp Are Big

Americans gobbled up shrimp at an unprecedented pace last year, according to Reuters news service, with the average consumer eating a record 3.2 pounds of the small 10-legged crustaceans.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration said Americans broiled, boiled and french-fried their way to a record that surpassed the previous high of 3 pounds per person in 1999.

Seafood consumption in the United States increased 2.3% in 2000, with a typical American digesting about 15.6 pounds, the NOAA said. Consumers also ate more tuna than they did last year, while consumption of salmon and sardines remained unchanged.

The Talking Vodka Bottle

From one of our favorite Web sites, News of the Weird (https://www.newsoftheweird.com), comes word that Russian inventor Dmitry Zhurin (or his colleague Sergei Lykov, depending on the news source consulted) told reporters in February that he had introduced a working model of a talking vodka bottle that proposes its own toasts (roughly translated: “Another round, then?” and “To our beautiful women”). The battery doesn’t last long after its first use, but then, as Zhurin pointed out, neither, usually, does the vodka.