There’s something quite discomforting about sitting in a shop, and watching a bunch of men speaking in a different language than you while holding sharp objects in their hands.  Especially when they are attacking the packaging of an expensive purchase, poking and slicing with scissors and knives like they needed to stab the scam out of the package!  And yet, there we were, Pat and I, just watching as this group of 3-4 gentleman were getting into this endeavor with the zeal of children opening Christmas presents.

Salesman:  Oh, look at this.  This is rayon, I can see through the packaging, and they are not done opening it yet.  You must return this immediately.  What is the address where you bought this, what is the phone number?

Excellent question.  The rickshaw driver took us to this store, and now we’re starting to wonder if he was also in on the scam.  Asking the rickshaw driver for the address is probably the wrong move, as we don’t want him to know that WE know something’s up if he is in on it.  Looking at the bill of sale for the rug, it was amazingly devoid of the address information, but did have a telephone number.  Armed with this information, Pat and I were finally able to leave the store and have the front desk find the address for us.  But the question in my mind was: can we actually roll up into this shop as a bunch of pissed off Americans and demand the money back?

Another excellent question.  Salesman #2 told us to go in their firmly and ask for the money back, and if that failed, start getting loud and throwing around words like ‘police’ and ‘U.S. Embassy’.  I was really hoping that it wouldn’t get to that point, because I’ve seen way too many action movies where the Westerner is in a foreign country, and the shop pulls the blinds and locks the door!  Last thing we needed was to get rolled by these scam artists…I already stuck out enough walking the streets in Delhi, I don’t think I could’ve endured the indignity of getting stripped of my clothes and being made to walk back to the hotel naked.

Okay, so that scenario really wasn’t possible.  This shop was enormous, on a main street, with tons of foot traffic…heck, it even had a credit card reader.  So this place was ‘safe enough’ as a place of business.  But walking into that shop just an hour after we had left, everyone in the place knew something was up, and there was a definite tension in the air.  Pat proceeded to tell the salesman that he wanted his money back…as the salesman waffled, using “my friend” as liberally as ever, Pat dropped the line that let the salesman know the scam was up:

The quality of this rug is not what you said it was, it’s garbage.

Holy #$&*%!, no poker bluffing here!  Honestly, I couldn’t believe that Pat went right for it like he did.  No, ‘you must’ve misremembered’ or ‘I changed my mind about this carpet’; rather, Pat’s statement hit that guy so hard, he probably still has the figurative slap mark on his face.  And this statement definitely set the tone for the rest of the transaction; there were store people scrambling all over the place, not knowing what to do.  We were offered a seat to relax, drinks, soothing words about quality…but they knew that we knew, and the only question remaining was if these scam artists would be quick enough on their feet to keep the scam alive.

They were not.  These scam artists had plenty of practice on the ‘hard sell to foreigners’, but I suspect that they’ve never had someone return like and demand their money back.  It was actually pretty pitiful watching these guys, using tape measures and pins to mark off space on the carpet, then proceed to count the stitches BY EYE.  Really guys, you can’t find a magnifying glass in the whole store? It never came down to it, but Pat actually had a magnifying glass in his pocket, so we could’ve stayed there hammering them until the store closed, continuing the scene right on the main shop floor.  But with one quick statement from Jig in Hindi, the scammers knew it was best to reverse the credit card transaction and get us the hell out of the store, because letting the remaining shoppers see the salespeople being reduced to rubble can’t be good for business!

So that’s the story of how a bunch of American’s got scammed in Delhi, got their money back and lived to tell about it.  In the final part of this mini-series, I’ll talk about why this episode was so interesting to me, both from a personal standpoint and an overall ‘doing business around the world’ standpoint.

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• It’s called the ‘New Delhi Shuffle’, part 1
• CCMBA 2012 – China Residency Begins – Part 1
• I remember….
• In Search of India – Part 4: Back to the Future