Yatai Fake Market Raid, Kade Club Relocation, & My Rainy Day Taxi Dilemma

Inspection team asking questions and taking details, originally uploaded by timbeckenham.

There are actual measures undertaken to counter the rampant fake trade in Shanghai, they are effective, and what's worse is that they are impacting my quality of life in an unexpected way.

Last Thursday, I found myself doing a little shopping at the Yatai Fake Fashion Market with D'Ray & AussieLozza. What I didn't expect was an actual Intellectual Property Rights raid by the power's that be.

The inspection session took about half an hour, during which I saw a lot of nervous looking stall owners. I was 'just browsing' in one of the more questionable stalls when the news of the raid spread throughout the market. I was promptly asked to leave, and then all the fake stock was hidden, the stall's lights were turned off, followed by the staff vacating & locking the doors. They can't raid you if you're not there right? What was ironic is that then a lot of the stall owners went over to the raided stores to have a good gawk. In fact, most of the observers in the photos could be linked back to any one of the stalls in the entire market.

What I was truly surprised by was that the inspectors only paid attention to two of the stalls. At that moment, the measures didn't strike me as an extensive use of anti-piracy measures. After the inspectors had left, I went back to chat briefly with one of the stall operators. I asked why they only checked out two stalls, and was answered with the news that inspections I had witnessed had been very frequent over the last few weeks, and had caused many shop operators to at least to hide all of their popular faked goods in the ceiling space or hidden compartments in their stalls.

Ladder inspection of fake goods hidden in stall rooves., originally uploaded by timbeckenham.

Hiding the goods appears to be a popular counter to the increased policing of copyright infringements and fake branded items in Shanghai of late. Another twist on avoiding detection by hiding brings to mind the recent relocation of Shanghai's infamous Kade Club DVD store chain from their Dagu Road and Zhenning Road locations to a single Taikang Lu outlet.

The problem is that the Kade Club staff weren't too clever about keeping the location hidden as they were handing out relocation directions to anyone who wandered past the store.

Personally, I'm not that fussed about the Kade Club as a DVD location. The DVDs were overpriced, and often we'd end up with a dodgy box set that didn't seem to work on any DVD player other than the Kade Club's demo unit. The main reason I went to that chain was it was less than 2 minutes walk from my front door and thus appealed to my inner sloth.

For me, the worst thing about the Zhenning Lu branch's relocation is that now I'm going to find catching a cab on a wet day increasingly difficult as there will no longer be a constant stream of bored expats in search of entertainment conveniently delivering empty taxis right near my apartment block.