CHAPTER TEN
Shopping before Dinner
“The culinary art is certainly above all others in Hong Kong.”
—Harold Ingrams, Hong Kong, 1952
Something happens to the spending habits of all tourists when they reach Hong Kong. Wallets fly open, purse-strings snap and money gushes forth in a golden shower.
It is a matter of record that in Hong Kong more tourists spend more money in a shorter time than in any other port of the Far East or the Pacific west of the American mainland. They shell out $120 a day during an average visit of five days, and almost 70 percent of the $600 five-day total is spent on things the tourist intends to take home. (The figures come, not from Hong Kong, but from an exhaustive study of Pacific and Far Eastern tourism made for the United States Department of Commerce.)
This $120-a-day spending average is applicable to all the colony’s civilian visitors except Overseas Chinese. In 1961, the total of such visitors was 210,000, and it was made up of 72,000 Americans, 67,000 British and 71,000 visitors of other nationalities. The number of tourists has more than doubled in the last four years. The Department of Commerce study estimates that the total may climb to 490,000 in 1968, and that tourists could be expected to spend $270 million in the crown colony during the same year. If all this comes to pass, it will carry the merchants of Hong Kong into the full sunlight of a golden age.
But how about the tourist? What does he get for his money that causes him to run hog-wild in Hong Kong shops? The answers are as varied as the shrewdness or the gullibility of the individual tourist.