If you can remember shopping in the late 70s or early 80s then this is for you. Koh Chang offers visitors a chance to relive their youth with a throwback to the days when stores such as Littlewoods or Woolworths ruled the world.
They succeeded by piling all manner of crap on the shelves, in a totally random order and then, for some reason lost in the midst of time, people bought it. The stores were staffed by people with no interest in what they were selling and no particular desire to sell it. Of course as soon as someone had an idea to put stuff on shelves in an obvious order; not rip customers off; add labelling; pay the staff; remove 80% of the junk and clear up the clutter, these stores went bust or had to change with the times.
The largest souvenir / bag / t-shirt / wine / shoe / crocodile skin jacket shop on the island is the Findig shop. A monolithic white block of concrete by the roadside slap in the middle of White Sand beach.
To some Findig is a byword for casual elegance and a sophisticated retail shopping experience. For the remaining 99.99999999% of the world it isn’t.
It’s a place that anyone with pretensions of possessing style will cross the street to avoid. It’s as though someone took all the stuff that you’d never expect people to buy when they were sober and put it together in one large junk filled emporium.
So, if you fancy re-visiting the retail shopping experience of 30+ years ago, take a look at Findig, where you can shop like it’s 1979.
This is hilarious. I am in love with this post.
I visited the store about a week after they opened and it didn’t have jacks-hit in there. I asked the ‘salesperson’
to order me a pair of Armadillo sneakers and she said “yes sir, give me a 5000 baht deposit and we’ll have them in 7 days”…
I didn’t give them one baht and am wondering if they actually got my sneakers and which poor ‘dillo gave up his life for nothing…