Co-opetition?

When I was about 20 and the Georgian economy had taken its post-Soviet slump, I remember seeing women on the sides of the road to Tbilisi selling fruit: a few grouped re-selling import bananas, next group selling local apples, then another group selling persimmon and pomegranates, then you saw three identical mountain sized piles of watermelons or melons. They never mixed. My minibus passed them every weekend on the way home and back to Tbilisi, and the grouping by product seemed as natural as anything else, a given... Until my Down Under colleagues commented on how weird it was, and that they'd probably sell more if only they regrouped to lure an apple customer to also get the bananas. All these years later, it does seem weird: isn't it natural to target your clientele away from your direct competition?

Given my background, it is only weird for me to be noticing and commenting on the following peculiarity of Hong Kong: stores do get to come in groups, in LONG STREETS of same produce.

On my second day in town, I was desperate for a quick replacement for my crashed laptop. The Google Almighty said there were quite some computer stores in Wan Chai. The map said Wan Chai was one subway stop away. I said, Off I go!

A good two hours later, after I had figured out the subway ticket (Octopus, rather than Oyster, in this part of the world), that Wan Chai is not the same as Chai Wan and is in the opposite direction, I was walking the streets, which supposedly had some 300 (!) computer stores. Except, what I saw was a loooooooong street of nearly identical stores selling bathroom tiles. I've seen streets lined with clothes or jewellery stores, but bathroom tiles?! I don't believe that all the stores of bathroom tiles I had ever seen in my life altogether would come to half the number of stores I passed by in 15 minutes that afternoon.

My gut was telling me that computer stores were unlikely to congregate in this community. So I came up to one of the owners and asked him where he thought I could buy a computer. He surprised me with good English and explained that there were two (only?!) places: Wan Chai Computer Center and a place a few subway stops away. I preferred the place close by.

The Wan Chai Computer Center turned out to be a 'congregation' of at least a couple of hundred vendors (the Almighty was not lying!) crammed on the space of a medium sized department store. I must give them credit: no shop had exactly the same produce as others and the variety was impressive, however the presentation, like anything else in Hong Kong, was pretty crowded.

But wouldn't you agree that it is quite convenient to only have to go to ONE part of town to choose your bathroom tiles when you are fixing up your bathroom? Especially when the variety is just enormous.

The reason I decided to share this today is because on my way to the airport, we were driving through a street on the Mainland, which was lined up with... sewing machine repair shops! How many sewing machines would you expect to break down in one city on a given day? I guess I must add in a city of 7 million, for it must be quite some: although quite dusty, the shops did not at all seem out of business.

Does this phenomenon reflect the local culture, I wonder? If you google 'competition culture' and Asia together, you'd come upon a multitude of Western projects centered around "promotion of competition culture" in Asia, support to Asian competition officials, etc. You also get to come across a very interesting study on Culture and Competition, which does not at all place Asian cultures as least competitive, yet does link competition to cultural values.