Why Is It Hard To Buy Stuff That Should Be Easy?

[Jingthing]

OP, you are so right. The same kind of problem in expat swamped Pattaya. Caroline cheese products? Only available at one store I know about it Pattaya -- Foodland, the others don't have it and offer the much higher imported price alternatives. Fresh roasted hill tribe coffee beans whole? Haven't found anywhere in Pattaya. (Bangkok and CM yes.) I could go on.

No DOITUNG coffee beans at Tesco Lotus Pattaya ? ( always at the BOTTOM of the shelf ! )

They have whole beans? Ground stuff everywhere. Haven't checked Tesco lately, will go if you say they have WHOLE beans.

[sambai]

That's why it's called a Developing Country. It clearly hasn't got everything working as it should, and it probably won't in our lifetime. Sorry, I don't mean to sound rude. Whenever I have frustrations about not being able to buy everyday commodities at sensible prices, this is the only way I can explain it.

It's very frustrating, I agree. I have given up enjoying wine - it's several times the price of Europe's and it's utter trash.

I think that in the Land of Smells, anything that has a luxury element (such as speciality foods), it will either be taxed heavily or just pushed-up in price by the supply chain who realises it can. Have you noticed the VAT-indicated items on your shopping receipts? Most of what we'd term food-essentials in the West, have VAT applied instead of being zero-rated. They certainly know how to tax the poor in this country.

[zzaa09]

That's why it's called a Developing Country. It clearly hasn't got everything working as it should.

Don't you mean: It's not Western {the absolute standard for civilisation} and doesn't abide by such standards....naturally undeveloped. It would be wise to really consider what developed and undeveloped might be.

[kikoman]

You are talking about good old fashioned "Capitalism" perfected in the west, a company has a contract with the processor to sell all his production to that company for export or resale.

While many Thai stores in the provinces sell very little Falang oriented foods, as there is not fast enough demand for them, supply and demand is also a factor, many food that were available in Lat Yao, are no longer sold because of the lack of demand, that also includes Thai oriented foodstuff.

I enjoy Guacamole at least 3 times a week lately as my neighbors GF comes to visit and brings me 2-3 kilos of avocados sold at road side stands for 20 baht a kilo.

Cheers:

[leemo]

I've never seen Thai molasses here but Friendship in Pattaya Tai does a US produced.

Makro (Pty) has Thai avocados at around 40bt/kg, next to the Aussie ones at c225 /kg. The Thais mostly look distressed, but in my experience about 50% ripen as they should within a few days while the others just sort of stubbornly shrivel up and go rotten.

Oddly enough when Makro were out of Thai and I bought some Aussie avos, they also followed the Thai trait of splitting into ripen and shrivel camps.

[dominique355]

Well, I have an example of the contrary:

I live in the Ramkhamhaeng area and on Soi 112 is a small shop selling dairy products, among which buffalo milk and buffalo mozzarella.

The farm is in Chachoengsau, more or less down the road and the shop on Ram 112 belongs to the farm. I heard the owner is Thai.

So some people got it right. One might even call them capitalist, because obviously it needs money to start a farm and a shop. So is capitalism so bad? Or would you prefer a state owned economy, especially here in Thailand? Good heavens no! Capitalism and the free market system are the only way to feed the world. There are too many examples out there to prove this.

[thaihome]

...Here's another example. About 30K down the road from where I live is a massive Seagate factory that produces hard disk drives. It employees about 7000 people. But, you can't buy a hard drive made in Thailand in Thailand. All the drives made in Thailand are exported to Europe and North America. The Seagate hard drives that are sold in Thailand are produced outside of Thailand.

It's nuts.

Seagate uses a BOI duty exemption to import the parts (mostly from China) to assemble the HDD's in Thailand on the condition that they are only exported. Very common government incentives to get companies to invest in a country.

TH

[Ratsima]

Well, I have an example of the contrary:

I live in the Ramkhamhaeng area and on Soi 112 is a small shop selling dairy products, among which buffalo milk and buffalo mozzarella.

The farm is in Chachoengsau, more or less down the road and the shop on Ram 112 belongs to the farm. I heard the owner is Thai.

Yes, and the Bangkok Post had a wonderful story about this farm in today's paper. (What a coincidence.) It's called the Murrah Dairy Farm. The article included a link to the farm's web site. The web site has a "contact us" link. I clicked it and tried to send them e-mail. The e-mail bounced with the message: "Remote SMTP server has rejected address"

So, here's a nice little enterprise that gets some wonderful free publicity about what seems to be nice products. But, they can't even be bothered to make sure that their web site is up-to-date so that anyone actually interested in buying their products stands a chance of doing so.

Just another example of horrible business sense. Another product that's hard to buy; even though it should be easy.

Thanks for a great segue into what was to be my next post in this thread.

Edited August 9, 2010 by Ratsima

[CanInBKK]

I don't think it so much an issue of supply and demand as the OP lives in an area which obviously has enough demand. I think the heart of the issue is an attitude of being, for lack of a better term, lazy. Caroline could easily sell to local supermarkets or open a retail outlet at the factory, better margins, more profit but also a heck of a lot more work....apparently too much work to overcome the "lazy factor".

[Ratsima]

I think you're getting close. Certainly, the Caroline cheese managers must shop at their local Tesco there in Pak Chong and notice that the only Caroline cheese available is Mozzarella. If you want Colby or Cheddar or Feta, you have to go with the imported stuff. Since Tesco already buys one Caroline cheese, it wouldn't be a great leap for them to buy more. But, everyone involved is just too lazy or clueless to make it all work.

I've long believed that most Thais have very limited event and geographic horizons which makes it extraordinarily difficult for them to see the big picture and go beyond the information immediately and locally available.

[Loz]

Its called a free market economy. The folk that own things get to call the shots. And if they can see a better "global" profit solution, they are entitled to take it. You think "local" cos you are an individual. When you have to answer to a board with global responsibilities you see if different picture. All business is a balancing act. You can't criticize it fairly without knowing the bigger picture. I'm not defending it, just explaining it in very broad strokes.

[Ratsima]

I'm afraid the broad strokes don't do it for me.

Let's take one particular example: Caroline cheese. As mentioned, this company produces, in Nakhon Ratchasima province, a wide variety of cheeses. Based on their advertisement on Thai Visa and their web site, it is evident that they want to market to the expat community in Thailand. Proof positive that there is a market for a wide variety of cheeses is the incredible array of imported cheeses carried by the national grocery chains including Home Fresh Mart (The Mall Group), Tesco/Lotus, Makro, Tops, etc.

Now, let's look at The Mall Group. They own both The Emporium shopping mall in Bangkok with it's Gourmet Market and The Mall in Korat with it's Home Fresh Mart. In Bangkok, The Mall Group chooses to stock its Bangkok grocery stores with the full range of Caroline cheeses as well as a huge number of imported cheeses. In Korat, The Mall Group chooses to ignore the locally produced Caroline cheeses and instead offers only expensive imported cheese, as does every other food retailer in the province.

Now, I might understand this as the workings of a free market economy if The Mall Group chose to maximize their profit by only selling the less expensive local cheese at their low-end outlet in Korat (where incomes are, on average, much lower than in Bangkok) and only selling the more expensive imported cheese at their Bangkok outlets which cater to a more affluent clientele. Instead they're doing just the opposite.

You'd expect that in a properly functioning free market the Caroline company would be pushing their cheese everywhere there is a market for it; especially locally. Why not? They have a huge competitive advantage over the high price of imported cheese.

No, this is not the workings of a function free market economy. This is an economy that, simply put, is broken.

[Loz]

One man's broken is another man's misunderstood.

Market positioning.

Product differentiation.

Trade agreements

manufacturing license caveats

local and national governance

All the above and more conspire to produce a structure that will never please all of the people all of the time. But it will please most, those people with the greediest stickiest fingers in the pie.

If you don't even know where and when the pie is coming out of the oven, stands to reason you will be the guy scraping up crumbs and complaining of the flaws in the system. If you are the guy who's back handers put a new Fortuner and Camry Hybrid on the driveways of your kids homes (while they study at Thailand's finest universities making all the right relationships to further the family empire) then I imagine you look on the musings of disgruntled customers with a wry smirk. fitting, is it not? for this is the land of smiles.

Edited August 10, 2010 by Loz

[Jimi007]

I don't think it so much an issue of supply and demand as the OP lives in an area which obviously has enough demand. I think the heart of the issue is an attitude of being, for lack of a better term, lazy. Caroline could easily sell to local supermarkets or open a retail outlet at the factory, better margins, more profit but also a heck of a lot more work....apparently too much work to overcome the "lazy factor".

I'm glad this thread was started when I got home and you have just hit the nail on the head! I just got back from Villa Market and two of the main things I went there for, they were out of. There's at least five employees standing around picking their noses. They can't take inventory and see they are running low on products? Their whole store is computerized. How hard is it to check how much of a product you have on a computer? The butcher counter is out of ground round beef. They have round roast, but they won't grind it! Oh grinder too big! LOL! I usually don't get upset, but it just gets to you sometimes how inept and lazy people are here as well as where I came from, the USA... I've heard I can be difficult to work with, as I actually work and know what I'm doing...