Do Chinese like to complain? Generally I would say no, they seem to be quite happy compared to the average Dutch or German citizen. But if it is about product quality you cannot fool them. If a Chinese person buys an electric article in a store you can make sure that he or she wants to test whether it works before paying. You don’t even have to ask for it, the store clerks take the article out of the box and plug it in for you. And if a product does not work as expected you can make sure Chinese will make a big fuss about it.

I remember a case a few years ago when I was still working at Mercedes-Benz where the Chinese owner of an SLK convertible was extremely angry because the car stopped working quite soon after he bought it. If I recall it correctly, he then got a donkey to pull the car to the city center. There some hired workers destroyed it with hammers in front of hundreds of onlookers. He got a lot of publicity and we were not too happy of course. Too bad for him the investigation afterwards showed that the malfunctioning of the car was due to the fact that he had used a low quality gas. So no new car for him.

But what if a product is better than you expected? Well, then you file a complaint as well. According to Pacific Epoch, this is what Dell found out when they started selling their Inspirion 640M notebooks with a newer model CPU. Fifty consumers complained about this, even though the new chip is just as fast but consumes less power. The article did not say whether Dell replaced the chips for them.