When I import product reviews, I always need to edit them manually, as some languages don't get translated properly (often with very confusing and/or hilarious results)
I noticed that at least half of the reviews from Russia include remarks about the smell (or the absence of smell)
For our Russian friends out there: Are Russian people obsessed by the smell of things? Are all Russian buyers compulsive product-sniffers, or am I just in a very smelly niche?
That’s really funny!
I have never paid attention to this fact, but such examples given by Meeyule here, show that it really exists. Russians are sniffing items inside the packages comming from China!
It is not an easy trick to expain it, but I have one guess.
We all know that China is the world's largest exporter of goods that covers almost each country on the Earth. But probably not everyone knows that China had (maybe has now) different production conveyors for different countries. The first one supplied the North America (USA/Canada), the second one worked for Europe and some other contries and the last conveyor was devoted to the ‘Third World’ countries including Russia.
The quality of products on these conveyors can be described as:
1. Top quality products
2. Good quality products
3. Very poor quality!
In 1990s (the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and economic crisis in Russia) loads of poor quality products overflew the Russian market that was ready for such items, since people were poor and products from China were cheap.
What do I mean by poor quality products?
These are boots for children that started smelling like hell on the second day after purchase and on the third they just crashed. Clothes, toys, food manufactured from low quality and even poisoning materials. For example, it was detected that Chinese bottles for infant milk delivered to Russia, contained hydroxybenzene twice exсeeding the normal level and leading to kidney and liver damage. Even rice included plastic!
And of course, all this rubbish smelled awfully bad.
Nowadays the situation has changed. There is much control and the quality of products from China became much better. However, Russian people still remember those days and I think in next 5 years Russians will still sniffing Chinese products. After, this habbit (it is like a defensive reaction) will passed into history.
P.S. I was shocked when many years ago I came to the US for the first time and found out that most of products sold there are from China! And no smell was detected!
