Shanghai customs warns Lady M cake contract buyers to ‘drop it’
Faced with massive queues at the luxury cake shop, sweet-toothed customers paid a premium to have their gateau brought in from Hong Kong
Here’s some food for thought: what if someone in Shanghai offered you a tasty fee to buy a slice of cake in Hong Kong and bring it back across the mainland border for them?
Sound like a piece of cake?
Well, it was a relatively easy way to make a fast buck until the Shanghai border authorities stepped in and warned that this particular form of daigou – or contract buying – is strictly off limits.
Daigou is a Mandarin term (pronounced ‘dye-go’ in English) for the common Chinese practice of buying goods abroad “on somebody else’s behalf” and bringing them back into China in return for a fee. Normally, the advantage of the system is that buyers are getting a much lower price – even with the (often significant) daigou charge factored in – for products ranging from infant formula to designer handbags.
However, in this slightly unusual case, price wasn’t the issue.
If you really want to enjoy it (the cake), be it in Hong Kong, Singapore or the United States, enjoy it there directly
The problem was the intolerable queues sweet-toothed Shanghai residents were faced with at their new branch of Lady M, the New York-based luxury cake maker. Unwilling to line up for hours at the hugely popular outlet in IFC Mall, but prepared to pay well over the odds for the much sought-after gateaux and pastries, they turned to daigou for help.