I guess you could award Australia Post an A for business savvy and adapting its model to a rapidly changing commercial environment. On the other hand, they surely deserve an F for their tin ear.
Public anger is running white-hot at revelations that Beijing-backed businesses quietly stripped essential medical supplies from Western countries even as the regime lied about the virus it was about to inflict on the world. So opening a “daigou” store in the commercial heart of Sydney right now is a risky public relations exercise, to say the least.
Australia Post has opened a retail outlet that only sends mail to China.
The concept store, located in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood, doesn’t provide any normal postal services like selling stamps or mailing parcels around the country. Instead, it sells health and beauty products that can only be shipped to China.
“Daigou”, meaning “buy on behalf of”, started as a clever bit of entrepreneurship for Chinese ex-pats, especially students. Taking orders by social media and mailing them to customers back home became a nice little earner. But it quickly metastasized. Daigou scarfed up so much of products like baby formula that stores imposed buying limits. Daigou are estimated to account for 80 to 90 percent of formula sales in Australia.
The “Daigou” scandal has been quietly bubbling along for some time, but has exploded in recent weeks. Aside from the revelations about medical supplies, videos of apparent daigou stacking pallet-loads of formula outside stores have ignited fury across social media.
Perhaps that explains Australia Post’s apparent reluctance to let the wider community in on its new venture.
When a giant store designed just for Daigou opened recently in Sydney, 150 Daigou attended and 730,000 Chinese shoppers live-streamed the event.
[But] it’s a little difficult to find as Australia Post doesn’t list the location on its online directory. A staff member at Australia Post’s main Chatswood post office gave some confusing directions, but made it clear to this reporter that the store is meant for Chinese tourists.
Chatswood seems like an odd location to target Chinese tourists[…]But it is a strong multicultural hub – those with Chinese ancestry are the largest demographic, making up 34.1 per cent of the community, and it turns out the state’s most popular shopping center for Chinese travellers staying longer than a month is found in Chatswood.
Business Insider finally found the concept store after asking for help from a postman in the middle of his route.
Opening a store blatantly pandering to daigou is not just a smart business move, it might be seen as an attempt to bring some kind of order to what has previously been a grey-market wild west. But it’s also an open invitation to a firestorm of bad publicity and community mistrust.
In 2015, half of all Australian baby formula sold in supermarkets was being shipped to China, accounting for more than $US200 million in sales. The next year, supermarket shelves infamously ran dry of baby formula[…]Finding enough formula is still a problem for parents, and supermarket giant Coles recently moved its tins behind the counter in some of its locations.
But there appears to be plenty on sale at Australia Post’s new “concept store”. That’s hardly likely to go down well with local parents battling to find any left on supermarket shelves.
Australia Post may well make a motza on its new venture, but it won’t be helping its public image any.
Nor is it doing much for community harmony, either. Worryingly, righteous anger at a few greedy Daigou is rapidly mestasizing into widespread animus against Chinese Australians. Quite obviously few Chinese-Australians are Daigou, but Daigou are conspicuously Chinese. Angry, frustrated local consumers are not always inclined to notice the difference.
Perhaps Australia Post thinks it’s doing a service by trying to move Daigou away from the local Woollies and perhaps impose a modicum of order on the whole business. But, right now, it’s hard to escape the nagging fear that they’re just throwing fuel on a smouldering social bonfire.
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