Team: Xiaoyan Kong and Mehr Un Nisa Javed
Here is a PDF File of the Photo-Essay Zine and a video for the project:
(The updated video is also in this file)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_eSTO5tXMQquNxWhECMQH8wj37kvOGUk?usp=sharing
I grew up in a market in puxi that’s similar to the first one. So It’s a not special place for me to visit. However, after these many years, standing from a different perspective, trying to be an outsider to observe their life feels quite special. I am especially surprised by the booming ecommerce’s impact on these offline physical shops. And how does that influence the customer service.
When we stepped into the market, the customers are not as many as we expected. In fact, there are very few customers. Among those few customers, most of them are old people who are just walking around and looking around to spend their time there. The wholesalers told us there would be more people during weekdays. But still won’t be too many. We observed the wholesalers what do they when they have no customers coming to buy their stuffs. We found out that most of them choose to spend their time on their phones or computers. They were either watching tv show online, videocalling their families back in their hometown or doing online business.
The wholesalers also told us one reason there are so few customers is due to the booming ecommerce. Their big business are all taken place online. So being in this market selling product, earning money, is just a very small portion of their income. People who come here usually only buy very little amount of things. So as a result, some of the wholesalers really don’t care that much about the individual customer in the market. Because they have more to earn online.That explains our confusion of the way wholesalers communicate with their customers. Their altitude are all like one of the wholesalers we talked to. He said “If they buy sth, it’s good. If they don’t buy, there’s no harm to me. I don’t depend on them to earn money.”