Just returned from another trip to Taiwan.
When I was there, once again, I visited a shop selling mainly rolling tobacco and related paraphernalia and some pipe tobacco.
“Shop” is a misnomer as the place is disorganized and looks like a messy warehouse.
The owner is a dick with a shitty attitude, ditto the two haughty young women daydreaming in his shop, one of whom is believed to be his daughter.
The usual cheerful and loud “Huanying guanglín!” (”Welcome!”) inherited from the 50 years of Japanese rule of Taiwan was conspicuously absent here. This is probably the only business in Taiwan where you are not greeted with a booming welcome as you enter. This is extremely unusual and most atypical and uncommon.
Instead, the welcome was glacial. The boss and the two women sat like statues, their languishing inertia broken only by my showing up. There was no courtesy, no smile, only an icy acknowledgment that my abrupt appearance – which they seemed to resent – was a monumental imposition on their quiet solitude, that I was a major interruption to their lives.
Decades-old pipes still line the shop’s shelves, their tarnished silver and oxidized mouthpieces always catching my eye. Despite this perennial fascination, I’ve never felt the urge to linger long. But this time, however, I decided to stay and take a closer, deliberate look.
I bought this Butz Choquin Festival, at a discounted price. I don’t remember the exact amount (selective memory?) but I believe the price tag said NT$10,000/- or something like that. There is nothing unique about this pipe – no nice grain, no nothing but I was looking for a pipe of this size and shape at that point in time, so I bought it.
He wanted nearly NT$30,000/- for this Luigi Viprati XXXX below – beautiful grain, with a sterling silver ring on the shank – but he was willing to knock the price down by at least 30% so I grabbed it. However, I wish it had been made with a single piece of briar. (Alas, the shank is joined to the bowl, reducing the value of this pipe by quite a bit.)
Anyway, I guess Mr Shitty figured it is better to sell for a little less rather than to not budge from the original price and let the pipe sit on his dusty shelf for another 30 years.
Luigi Viprati’s XXXX pipes are positioned as “premium” so I’m not too unhappy, despite the contemptuous attitude of those three living dead sourpusses in the store. Viprati passed away in June this year, Mr Shitty probably doesn’t know about it; if he does, he definitely would not be selling me that pipe at a discount.
Customers with money to spend should not have to tolerate being insulted and treated badly by shopkeepers. They should do business with shops that welcome them. Yet time and again I have seen pipe collectors swallowing all kinds of abuse, sucking it up, being bullied, treated like beggars, just because there are pipes they want so badly and only those shops operated by the living dead have them.
I guess I was one of those masochists last week in Taiwan.
Just so you know, I tell it like it is, straight from the shoulder. I do not accept goods or meals on a contra basis to be written up on this blog. I am not one of those parasitic free-loading “influencers”/”content creators,” some of whom can’t even write proper English to save their lives.