I just bought a camera in Bangkok, and the experience was amazing.

The first thing which struck me in Thailand is that there's much more of a "in-person retail" shopping culture than in Germany.

In Germany, by default, you order stuff online, including expensive stuff. It's a very trustworthy system with low fraud. Returns are simple and easy. You can literally order stuff online, try it out and send it back.

In Thailand, it's a bit more complicated. For cheap things, you order those online, and they're very cheap - the typical no-name Chinese "plastic things" which might be 5-15€ on Amazon Germany might be 0.5€-1€ on Shopee/Lazada Thailand.

Expensive things, however, you buy those in person at the retail store. That's because there still is some amount of fraud when ordering online, and returns are more complicated or even impossible.

Now, the German knee-jerk reaction I initially had was "this sucks! I want my Amazon shopping experience back!"

But then again.. maybe there was something to the Thai retail culture. So let's try it out.

After lengthy online research, I settled on the Sony A6700. My research was so lengthy that it strained the patience of ChatGPT, which warned me that maybe my main motivation it this quest might not be about photography, but about researching cameras without buying them.

Trying to prove ChatGPT wrong (among other things), I set out to buy a camera and walked into a Big Camera store. Big Camera stores are very ubiquitous in Bangkok - it feels like every large mall has a Big Camera store.

Now, what I didn't know about these stores is that they're actually more like a social space. Like, as a well-prepared German dude, I was ready to enter the store like a SWAT team: Come extensively prepared, rattle down my prior research and my prepared questions to the salesperson and make a time-constrained decision in, say, 10 minutes, because everything in Germany tends to be time-constrained.

But, at Big Camera, the salesperson is more like "here, have a seat", and you sit down at one of the many small round glass tables, a bit like at a coffee shop. Okay. The German in me is feeling uneasy about this. What is going to happen next?

When can I rattle down my prepared information and show the salesperson that I'm not wasting their time? Are other customers waiting? Am I hindering the friendly salesperson from taking their mandatory legal coffee break or attending a labor union meeting? Just kidding. But it indeed takes some getting used to that things are laid back here.

The salesperson proceeded to bring out the camera I wanted to try, plus another camera which might be worth trying out, plus a few lenses. Wow - you can, like, just take cameras out of the shop window and try them out? With no time limit? The salesperson doesn't make you feel like you're a hindrance to them and wasting their time? That's amazing.

I inquired about a certain lens which I wanted to try out. Trying out lenses is totally viable - the salesperson just walks over to the shop window again, fetches them and hands them to you - but this particular lens was not in stock. Damn. The colleague confirmed that this lens is generally hard to get right now.

I proceeded to search online, and it turns out that their competitor (Zoom Camera) has the lens in their online shop. In any case, I'd have to think about this purchase now - yes, I'm very interested in the camera, but I'd really like to buy it with this specific lens, best case, from the same shop.

I kindly excuse myself and tell the friendly salesperson that I need to think about this whole lens situation in general, I'll take a walk and might be back.

Exiting Big Camera, the universe proves yet again that it's a reality TV simulation in which aliens are probably watching me on TV, eating alien popcorn and having a great time. That's because the Zoom Camera shop is literally opposite Big Camera. So it's approximately 6 meters walk. I walk into Zoom Camera.

They have the lens I'm looking for. Nice. But you can't try it out. Bummer. Also, their price for the camera is higher than at Big Camera, so buying both items here seems not super smart. Okay, good to know, time for another walk around the mall to think.

After 15 minutes, I have formed a plan: I'll buy the camera body from Big Camera and the lens from Zoom Camera. Sounds very obvious in hindsight, but it apparently took me a 15-minute walk to figure this out.

So I walk back into Big Camera. The friendly salesperson already comes walking towards me and is like "oh check it out, we actually found your lens somewhere in our secret back room storage!". Thai language can sometimes be a big ambiguous, and this was another data point for it, especially if you speak Thai like a 3-year-old like I do.

I don't know what sort of impressive feat they pulled to acquire the lens during my 15-minute walk (did they walk over 6 meters to Zoom Camera?), but, for what it's worth, I'm fine leaving this as a mystery and concluding that "you gotta respect the hustle", and respect the hustle I did!

Also, in contrast to Zoom Camera, they let me try out the lens first. The lens was still wrapped in its original packaging, so they sliced open the plastic foil. Again, Thai language (and culture) can be a bit ambiguous - why was it still wrapped in plastic? What would they do with this now-open packaged lens if I decided not to buy it? But, as so often in Thai culture, a good base assumption is to assume good intentions while things remain slightly ambiguous.

The lens was great, and I decided to purchase. Mind you, the whole process had been easily taking one hour already.

The friendly salesperson went back to the counter to get the final invoice done.

If I had one criticism of Big Camera, it would be that it always seems very complicated for them to look up and compute prices. Each price lookup can take a few minutes? I wonder if they're computing some sort of prime number decomposition each time (in Excel). But this is a very minor problem in the grand scheme of things.

After paying, the friendly salesperson helped me set up the camera! Wow. I suppose this is another aspect of Thai retail culture: As your options for returns and refunds are limited, people prefer to open the newly-purchased items in-store and test them thoroughly before taking them home.

I actually like this concept because it feels fair to both the buyer and the seller - you test everything as much as you like, but once you decide it's good, the purchase is made. I know of online sellers in Germany often having problems with return fraud (customer sending goods back after using/breaking/replacing them), and this sounds like a good solution.

Somehow, in my European mind, over the past 1-2 decades I got trained to not go to retail stores any more. That's because they're overly expensive and the customer experience sucks.

The surprising solution to this seems to be to not make them overly expensive and not make the customer experience suck. Seems to work in Thailand.

I'm off taking some photos!