Part of the charm of this country is the fact that it is very different from the western world. There are times that I get very frustrated, actually kind of mad, at how things are set up here but I wouldn't trade them for how things are in the western world. For the most part this country is far less of a consumerist type of society and we aren't bombarded with advertisements everywhere we look attempting to get us to be spending money at all hours of the day even with money we don't even have yet.
This doesn't change the fact that as a westerner, I am at times rather alarmed by how difficult it can be to find what I would consider simple things that are just available everywhere in the western world. Today it was reading glasses but honestly, it could be any manner of things.
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Vietnam is a VERY densely populated country. When you consider that there are nearly 100 million people in this country and it is relatively small, you can kind of get an idea about how many people are going to be just about anywhere that you go.
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Vietnam has a bit under 1/3 the population of the USA and that is how big it is, to give my American friends an idea about how populated it is here.
With this high of a population, one would think there would be some sort of stores that would attempt to accommodate a wide variety of products but if that is what you are hoping for, you will be dreadfully disappointed when you get / live here. The shops here tend to be incredibly specialized and will only have one or two kinds of products. Perhaps it is just the American in me but there is no equivalent of Target or Wal-Mart here. They have supercenters sure, but they don't have just everything the way we are used to it back in the west. If you are buying groceries you go to a grocery store and if in that same trip you want some clothes you go to a clothes store. Insert just about any product you can imagine and they have a store for that, it just isn't all under one roof.
They also have strategic placement of certain products and by strategic I mean that they are hidden and their availability is simply really difficult to find at all because the markup on said items are not high enough to warrant having them in stock at all. This is my presumption anyway because today I went out looking for simple reading glasses and walked for about 5km, went into several shops that advertised themselves as being optic shops and none of them had reading glasses. They had glasses, for sure, but they wanted you to sit down with an optician or whatever the hell those people are called that know how to use a machine but aren't doctors are. Then they do an eye-exam, which I do not need or want, then they try to get you to try on a bunch of severely over-priced frames so they can fit them with a lens that isn't even in the store at that time and wont be for several days.
I'm not paying $200 for something that exists in basically every pharmacy in the western world for $3.50.
I just need something extremely simple like this. 1.5 or 2x magnification depending on the situation. The rest of my life I can lead without ever wearing glasses... for now. But at these optic shops they don't carry these products and I can only assume that this is because they want to sell you something that is dramatically marked up in price. 50,000 VND is about $2, and this photo was taken from an online store similar to Amazon that is called Lazada and is very popular in Vietnam as well as other SE Asian countries.
After walking around to several optic shops and them simply not having a product that optic shops should have, I just went online and ordered 2 pairs of this at 1.5 and 2x magnification.
I am one of those people that wants to stimulate the local economy as much as I can but since I cannot find the product in stores that one would assume would sell them, I have no choice but to order this from god knows where. Much of the featured items in Lazada come from China. I would imagine almost all of them do.
But my particular situation aside, people that are visiting or thinking of living here you need to get accustomed to being let down by shopping for things that you need. Chances are you are going to come home empty handed unless what you are looking for is a beer and a bowl of noodles.
If there even is a reading-glasses store, and I am sure there is in this gigantic city, I'm sure they have thousands of pairs of them for damn near free. The question is can you actually find it?
most of the expat population has almost everything delivered from an online shop these days because it is an exercise in futility to go out and try to find something in a store. Hell, just the other day I went to a shop that sold air-fryers but they only had 2 models, both of which were ludicrously expensive. The cheapest one they had was over $100. I was in the store and looking at this thing when I found one that had pretty similar specification but was $20. That's not a tough choice to make.