Danes Fooled by Chinese AI
Fake online shops make Danes believe they are buying Danish quality
Danes are happy, as we know from the yearly happiness reports, always placing Denmark as one of the top countries.
Happiness is in that context mostly something about economy, but I could add another dimension to it: they tend to trust others. In some countries, that would make them “happy idiots”, but in Denmark, the concept normally works. Most shops will happily replace a product if you are not happy with it, no matter the legal details, so Danes will often just buy something, check it out, and then bring it back if they don’t like it. Hence, they trust that this is possible, and the rare occasions where it isn’t will get talked about, and the shop will gain a bad reputation.
When people from abroad notice how much trust Danes put in a shop, even such one they have never heard about, and when they know that Danes are relatively wealthy and willing to pay more for a good brand, they may come up with ideas to abuse this situation.
Like this one, mentioned today on the Danish national TV-station DR: The Mareno Aarhus online shop.
Read about it in the article (in Danish) at the TV-stations website.
The short version of the story is that a Dane wanted to equip their new apartment with lighting, found a website that offered half price on some interesting lamps. It was, apparently, a shop that had been selling lamps from a physical address in Denmark’s second-largest city, Aarhus, for 20 years, and the website even claimed that the lamps had been designed in Aarhus.
The shop had a profile of sustainability, craftsmanship, and durability.
This way, pushing all the right buttons to inspire a quality-aware and brand-aware Dane to buy.
It then turned out that the lamps didn’t work well and didn’t display a quality that could reasonably correspond to the price. Also, the shop turned out to not exist at all, and the lamps being from China, and even dangerous to use, as they are highly flamable.
In fact, the website and its photos were AI-generated – all fake.
This kind of article shows by itself another aspect of the trusting nature of Danes – being spawned by a TV-program where journalists are experts, telling the truth about something that most Danes wouldn’t find out on their own. These experts can find things on the Internet, for instance, and they can call a company to ask questions about a product. Danes, often being watchers rather than doers, watch such TV-programs and tell each other afterward what they have learned. A good topic to talk about during the lunch break at work or when the neighbor offers a cup of coffee.
It is typical for Danes that they immediately believe that a presumably known brand with high prices, now on sale, represents better quality products than a lesser known brand that always has such lower prices.
Brands are used all over the world to justify higher prices, so Danes are not unique in this respect, but perhaps they are a bit naive in not checking out things before buying. They jump right into it, feeling good for a moment that they were able to find such a good offering on something that normally costs more. And only when they then get the product by mail, and it obviously is cheap crap, not worthy of any esteemed brand name, they may start wondering.
Actually, it is typical that they just eat the loss and forget about it, throwing the product in the garbage bin. But a few will occasionally complain about things in such a way that TV or newspapers will show an interest in it. How this comes to happen is often a bit mysterious, but my guess is that Facebook is the source of many such stories in the media – someone tells about it, others “like” it, and a journalist, hungry for something juicy to tell about, sees this and takes it to their editor as a suggested new story (or they just run with it on their own, as freelancers).
Certain is it, though, that most people can tell similar stories when they see this on TV, because the neighbor or a cousin knows someone who also bought the same cheap crap from the same shop. Probably, many people will buy this and get disappointed, before someone decides to complain publicly about it.
Part of the naivety comes from the fact that the loss of, in this case, 500 kroner x 2, isn’t significant for a typical Dane. They get good salaries from their jobs, being able to pay the mortgage or rent for living, for food, entertainment, and various luxury items on a regular basis.
I guess, this is calculated in by the scammers. They set a price that fits the sweet spot for Danes, economically, where it is sufficiently expensive to plausibly look like a good brand, and yet, cheap enough for the loss to not be big enough for a typical Dane to want to bother too much with complaining, seeking a refund, etc.
Danes trust shops, journalists, and virtually any other organizations and people, and are open and listening, willing to take in any explanation being given without doing their own fact-checking.
That helps make the Danish society “hyggeligt” (that special Danish word for being pleasant, cozy, nice) and mostly free of conflicts. But it is also an open invitation to scammers from all-over the world to try making a profit on it. Because, as most Danes would think, “Danes would never do such a thing”.
As a side note:
The idea of something “being designed here – manufactured in China” is widespread all over the Western world. We “know”, all of us, that Chinese design is bad, but “our own” design is good, and then the Chinese are simply good at producing things at a low cost, making it more affordable for us to buy.
We have this dualist approach to accepting that everything now comes from China. But we can’t really accept it, deep within. So people want to believe that something they consider buying is better than that.
Actually, there are many great brands that are purely Chinese. I can mention such a Xiaomi or Enya, that sell different products (electronics and musical instruments) but designed and products to high standards.
Yet, many of us can’t believe in it, having grown up with the idea that good design is from the West, always.
Situations like the lamp scam surely do not help to change that idea, and somehow we have a selective memory, forgetting how many products made locally that were actually quite bad.
I keep wondering when we will grow up to understand what reality we live in today: where very few things are manufactured locally, and where “Danish design” or similar is merely a matter of having picked a model from a catalog of available goods from a Chinese factory and sending them a file with a logo to put on the goods.
Xiaomi is pretty great, in my experience. But it's sad that you guys are maybe one of the last trusting people there are and people take advantage of that.