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Repair Culture China
The total cost of owning a product includes the risk it will break, and the cost and ease of repair if it does. Assuming it is out of warrantee, or that it even had a warrantee - grey market imports and used phones won't be covered. A feature of lower income consumers is that every yuan, rupee and cent counts - everything that helps the consumer shaves a few cents off the price will get mindshare.
Whilst in India Aditya pointed me into the direction of Delhi's thriving mobile phone sale and repair culture at Karol Bagh market, and with the help of colleagues been doing some follow up research here in JiLin. There are many shops clustered around Dong Shichang Market selling used mobile phones, and tucked into the back of most of these is a small repair counter typically staffed by the husband of the lady who owns the shop. Spent a little while exploring the user experience of getting a phone fixed through informal channels.
The choices for JiLin consumers with an out of warrantee product is to: buy a new phone (prohibitively for most people); go to the (official) Nokia Care shop; or take it to one of the repair guys. Of course to do this properly we needed a phone, broken. Bought a used Nokia 8850 for 250 RMB (18 Euro). The first shop we entered had a very friendly repair guy, who once he overcome his initial scepticism at our request and was happy to help out.
"I'd like you to break this phone display please"
"Um"
"But not smash it, more of a little crack"
"Er"
"And trash the speaker, as if its been dropped in the toilet"
He managed to disassemble, selectively break and then rebuild the phone in less than 5 minutes. And then out to the next shops to get it repaired...
Side note: Wishing I had bought The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid with me for a re-read but the hard back is just too bulky to lug everywhere. Reading a PDF on a laptop is about as enjoyable as waiting for XP to boot.
Writing from Tokyo | July 2, 2005 | Permalink