Hanoians don’t like plastic. At least not when it comes to money. In Hanoi, you don’t pay by card. You pay cash. As often as possible.
This obviously applies to food (many restaurants don’t even have a card machine, and if they do, then it is often mysteriously broken), but it also applies to the purchase of a refrigerator. Or the purchase of stocks and bonds. Or cars. A friend always carried a suspiciously large handbag with them, and when asked about it one day casually answered: "Oh, that's the money for today’s stock purchases. I'm on my way to the bank.".
True, that was a few years ago, before the Hanoi stock market began its downward slide. Today, shares are bought less frequently, and real estate more and more often. And how did a good friend pay for the purchase of his 100,000 € apartment? In cash.
He went to the bank, took the money from his account, had it counted (which took some time) and then handed it over in cash to the sellers of the home. They in turn had it counted again, and then went one floor up to deposit the money into their account at the same bank. With a computer transaction a lot could go wrong, both sides argued: then in the end the money is gone, and nobody wants to take the blame. Cash is simply more secure.
Just as a side note: €100,000 in Vietnamese Dong, that’s a lot of paper. The biggest Dong notes are 500,000, equivalent to a 20-Euro note. If you're lucky, an ATM machine will be filled with these 500,000-dong notes. More commonly available though, are smaller bills: 50,000 or 100,000 Dong. In other words: two to four Euros.
You can imagine how many four-Euro bills you would need to get a purchase price of 100,000 € together. I've seen it with my own eyes, and was actually quite surprised: the entire sum fit into two plastic bags.
Which incidentally demonstrates that the introductory sentence is not true. Of course Hanoians love plastic. As long as it’s in the form of bags or packaging. Oh, and the paper money, by the way, is made of a polymer blend, which is particularly resistant to the humid and warm climate. The bills don’t wrinkle, they don’t get wet and they turn yellow very slowly. And another name for polymer is… plastic.
dfp
