It’s great to go out with friends again and today (or rather yesterday since 12am passed) we went around Ion Orchard, one of the latest new malls opened along Orchard Road to look around. For me, it’s the very first time since it opened and I guess I was pretty much a country bumpkin when it comes to shopping stuff although I live pretty close to town.
The entire mall is basically divided into the high-class stuff at the upper levels and the more ordinary, typical-mall stuff in the basements. The basement stretches to B4 and the deepest floor actually houses all the food places. The bad thing about that is that smell of food don’t escape properly and the ventilation seems somewhat problematic. I was feeling pretty uncomfortable at that level and was suffering from a bad headache then.
But well, I might be able to go on and on about the design of malls, placement of retail outlets and so on if I were an architect. Unfortunately, I’m just an economist so I decided to work on the question of why do we so often get conned at restaurants.
The Facts
We had dinner at Imperial Treasure Restaurant; Wenjie and I ordered a plate of Roast Pork which cost us $8.00 SGD (that’s before 10% Service Charge and a subsequent 7% GST, which simply put, is about 17.77% worth of additional money) to share.
In the economy, many things are about faith and trust. We trust the restaurant to serve us food worthy of the prices we pay and that they will not scam us by compromising on the quality of our food. This is how we even decided to step into the restaurant. Unfortunately, while economic theory describes that we pay $8.00 for that Roast Pork because the market supply and market demand meets at that point for the product (which in this case, also includes the plates, services, ambience, queuing system for rationing seats in the restaurant to the crowd waiting outside and the list goes on), the fact is we don’t. We didn’t even properly assessed the product before ordering and we lacked information, we went ahead nevertheless in faith of the market and with a trust in Imperial Treasure Restaurant. And here’s where the idea of Perfect Competition actually breaks down totally.
From our perspective, we were coerced into paying 8 bucks for that pathetic 9 small pieces of Roast Pork that is usually worth less than 2 bucks outside, even when you include the prices of that 12 tiny little roasted peanuts used as garnish and that English Parsley which we failed to consume anyways. Could we have cancelled the order when we realised how pathetic the portion of food was? Perhaps, but we didn’t try – which is another sign of the power of the producer. There was little we could do and that is disappointing. All we can say is “Not going to order this again if we come here” and that’s the little pinch of consumer power we have.
There’s way too much power in the hands of our dear producers and I thus decided to exert my consumer force right here and right now. No more Roast Pork from Imperial Treasure Restaurant!
