Mobile communicating place and place-inscribed communicative mobilities: Shaping alternative consumer cultures in mobile media communication

Introduction

Contemporary media industries extensively shape consumer cultures (Lury, 2011). It is interesting to cast a glance at how mobile media communication as a new context or approach changes consumer cultures. In turn, novel connections between mobility and consumption such as those in consumer mobilities, flows of consumer goods, and moving consumption, may advance knowledge of mobile media and communication. This article presents an ethnography of mobile purchasing practices between mainland China and Hong Kong (HK) to discuss how mobile communication strengthens the sense of interconnectedness between places and mobilities and renews consumer cultures in that context.

In recent years, China has seen a growth of domestic demand for worldwide consumer goods, from daily to luxury. A niche market called daigou—a common name for the Chinese personal shopping business and the shoppers who parallel trade or perform personal purchasing of overseas consumer goods in different regions—has flourished in this context. Personal shoppers profit from the commodity price gap and exchange-rate variation between places. HK is a popular site for daigou practitioners. They travel to HK, purchase, and carry commodities to mainland China, and deliver goods by express service to customers. Facilitated by Chinese social media such as WeChat and Weibo, shoppers place orders, bargain, and coordinate with customers in their cross-border ¹ mobile purchasing processes.

This paper explicates the role of mobile communication practices in altering the production of mobilities and the multiplicity of place in HK daigou. It is telling that shopping on Amazon.com and street shopping create distinct spatial and mobile experiences, based on different patterns of transportation, bodily movements, uses of the Internet, and logistics services. Digital and physical visits to shopping spaces are rarely done simultaneously, as in daily life, people typically choose one way of shopping for each act of consumption. This paper, alternatively, illustrates that the mobile communication practices of HK daigou orchestrate the seemingly exclusive digital and bodily engagement of shopping spaces; the practices facilitate alternative meaning-making in the consumption of a place, and support mobilities related to the materiality and social meanings of the place.

This study reassembles the literature of mobilities and place-making through the lens of microcoordination and synchronization in mobile communication studies. I specify the crossover between the three branches of literature in the case of cross-border consumer cultural practices. I argue that mobile communication as a social practice extends relational places (Massey, 2005) in cross-border shopping, on the one hand, and transforms the performances of mobilities used to anchor the spatial identities (Schwartz & Halegoua, 2015) of shoppers and localities (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012) for consumption, on the other. Two analytical parts support the argument. I first show that daigou practitioners’ lining-up practices connect with the real-time bodily performances of mobilities in HK. The practices, characterized as mobile communicating place, facilitate daigou practitioners’ consumption of HK—a physical and symbolic space of global-local shopping. The next section compares the patterns of synchronization and microcoordination of mobile purchasing in Tsim Sha Tsui (TST) and Sheung Shui (SS). I emphasize that the mobilities of people or goods in purchasing procedures, characterized as place-inscribed communicative mobilities, are produced in accordance with the material settings of HK and the meanings of locations (TST and SS).

Research context: Place-based consumer cultures in HK

The “malling” process in the tourist industry and the development of shopping spaces profoundly influence HK’s shopping-mall cultures today, creating its global brand and local ways of living (Lui, 2004). Since the return of HK in 1997, mainland Chinese tourists have become major consumers of shopping mall merchandise. The local settings of shopping in HK, including both the well-developed transportation between mainland China and HK and the overwhelming number of stores in HK, facilitate personal visits and personal shopping activities from mainland China. In contrast with its shopping malls, HK’s online shopping infrastructure is not well developed. Few HK-based shopping websites exist. The cross-border logistics services between mainland China and HK are expensive and are strictly regulated by governments from both sides. Therefore, mainland Chinese favor personally shopping in-store or hiring personal shoppers to visit HK indirectly.

Material spaces and spatial divisions (the differences between HK island, Kowloon island, and New Territories) also define the consumer cultures in HK. The spatial relations perceived, experienced, and mapped out in a given setting of HK tell different stories of consumption and identification (Cheng, 2004). Rather than treating HK as a homogeneous shopping place, daigou practitioners follow the market rhythms, commodity supply channels, and shopping facilities in different shopping sites there, as I will illustrate of the distinct mobile purchasing practices in TST and SS. They plan shopping routes and make use of different commodity-acquisition resources, sales and coupons, and yearly department stores’ customer-appreciation days.

Moreover, cross-border shopping in China shows that regional differences reflect the value of commodities and the symbolic value of consumption behaviors. Chinese consumers demonstrate preferences based on perceived regional differences in cross-border shopping. For example, Australia is famous for selling nutrition products and medicines, while European countries have an advantage in trading luxuries. Consumer cultures regard places of shopping as sites of professional identification for daigou practitioners. Visiting HK to purchase globally sourced and locally featured commodities resonates with place-based consumer cultures. That HK converges on multiple globalized products and promotes many local brands with traditional Chinese style further complicates consumer perceptions. Commodity supply in HK is divided into regional brands (e.g., European, American, Australian, or Korean brands) and local brands (health care, medicines, and foods that are made in HK). The HK-produced products are promoted as high quality, with unique HK style, a guarantee of health and hygiene, and traditional Chinese recipes. For example, a famous medicine brand, Wai Yuen Tong, depends on the image of “the finest Chinese tradition of herbs and products.” Local food company Maxim’s Cakes advertises its snacks with reference to their historical fame, traditional Chinese flavor, exquisite packaging, and guaranteed quality. In short, HK daigou is embedded within place-based consumer cultures, and daigou practices also shape those cultures. I contextualize my discussions of mobility, place-making, and mobile communication of daigou in the cultural background.

Mobility, place-making, and mobile communication

Mobility refers to the socially meaningful ability of people and objects to move and be moved between different locations (Cresswell, 2006), which manifests as “physical travel of people; physical movement of objects; imaginative travel elsewhere through images and memories; virtual travel on the internet; and communicative travel through person-to-person messages via objects” (Larsen et al., 2006, p. 4). “Place” refers to particular forms of social and material spaces shaped through practices of social relations (Massey, 2005). The concept of mobility has become a pervasive metaphor of a changing society and a characteristic of contemporary social lives, which mirrors multilayered theories of mobility patterns and sociotechnological features (Adey, 2017). Mobilities phenomena not only bring about reflections on place, stability, and dwelling as natural steady states but also are concerned with invisible and immobile technological infrastructures as moorings of mobility (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006). Given that mobility is used to theorize social phenomena at different levels of abstraction, I narrow the term mobility in this research to center on the mobile and immobile experiences of individuals using transportation and communication technologies.

The impacts of mobile communication devices have been widely noted, regarding experiences of mobility, connectivity, and relations with place and space (Campbell, 2013; de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014; Jensen, 2013; Ling, 2004). Scholars have argued that mobile communication devices refresh our feelings of presence and proximity with places and spaces (Humphreys, 2007) and experiences of being mobile and place-based cultural consumption (Hjorth, 2008). Certain studies have characterized that space or place-making and mobilities condition each another in mobile-device-enabled online communication (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012; de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014; Farman, 2012; Frith, 2012). This study is built on discussions of the mutual shaping of mobilities and place-making practices.

Mobilities of media devices complicate how mobile populations or sedentary individuals sense and make places. Mobile media afford diverse modes of belonging to and perceptions of places, such as through virtual navigation and relocation among migrant professionals (Bork-Hüffer, 2016), sense of belonging to a community that extends across a series of local places for global expatriates (Polson, 2015), place-based labor migrant identity across China and other countries (Xie & Witteborn, 2019), and dual public and private spatial imagination among lesbians in HK (Choy, 2018). Moreover, because mobile media devices are nowadays primarily built to represent and react to places of operation and people’s networking, synchronization, and coordination via locative media, new relations with places and spaces are emerging (Humphreys, 2007), such as “net locality” (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011) and “hybrid mediated spatiality” (de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014). The display of offline physical activities based on socially driven, location announcement, and performative identity practices facilitates the “spatial self” (both online and offline; Schwartz & Halegoua, 2015). Scholars have generally agreed that mobile-device-enabled communication facilitates diversified mobility contexts. Rather than creating placeless experiences, mobile-device-enabled communication still embeds the meanings and physical configurations of specific localities.

On the other hand, some have noted that mobile device practices refine physical and symbolic places, depending on new patterns of performance and the appropriation of mobilities in response to place (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012; de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014; Farman, 2012; Frith, 2012). Frith (2012) argues that Internet-enabled mobile phones have not decreased the importance of physical mobility; instead, the digital information on the Internet has begun to merge with physical space. The interplay of digital information, location, and social interaction, conceived as “social interfaces” (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012) and “mobile interfaces” (Farman, 2012) on mobile devices, facilitates embodied communication within physical and digital spaces. Farman (2012) suggests that embodied spatial practices like mapping enact mobilities that correspond to social, digital, and real space. In this sense, many scholars agree that the pervasive adoption of locative media complicates mobility practices such as the ability to move from one place to another, mobile experiences, and possibilities to experience mobility in relation to place (de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014; Farman, 2012; Frith, 2012).

The aforementioned overlapping of the literatures on mobilities and studies of space implies the interweaving of mobilities and place-making in contemporary mobile media communication phenomena. However, mobile communication studies rarely explicate such mobility–place interactions and the notions of their interconnectedness. Meanwhile, existing research concerning mobile place-making (Bork-Hüffer, 2016; Polson, 2015), mobile-device-enabled spatiality (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012; Humphreys, 2007), and mobile-device-enabled mobilities (Choy, 2018; Frith, 2012) has paid more attention to the hallmark of shifting experiences of mobilities and spaces, thus treating practices of mobile communication as relatively fixed and taken-for-granted contexts in their discussions. To fill the literature gap, this research foregrounds the mobile communication processes/practices that alter the nexus of place-making and enactment of mobilities (physical, virtual, and imaginative forms of mobility). I acknowledge the multiplicity of places in the making (Massey, 2005) and the notion of communication, which include symbolic forms and material elements in the production of places and territories and the facilitation of mobilities at different levels (Morley, 2017, p. 30). As such, this study presents a case for understanding the distinct nature of mobile communication, which is to say, the communicative possibility across contexts that is afforded by the spatial mobility of media devices and carriers as mobile termini (Campbell, 2013; Helles, 2013; Jensen, 2013; Ling, 2004). I also contribute to discussions of mobility patterns, spatial relations, and cultures shaped by mobile communication technological practices (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012; Farman, 2012; Hjorth, 2008; Humphreys, 2007).

“Purchasing,” a particular procedure in personal shopping, in this study refers to the nexus of doings and sayings regarding the acquisition of consumer goods (Schatzki, 2008). Shopping practices are arguably related to the social construction of place (e.g., Miller, Jackson, Thrift, Holbrook, & Rowlands, 1998; Urry, 1995). Shopping practices can extend and transform local practices of using and experiencing public space (Lehtonen & Mäenpää, 2000). Some consumption studies have further noticed that consumer mobility, consumption objects, and devices for mobile consumption have become important for the processes and practices of consumption (e.g., Brembeck, Cochoy, & Moisander, 2015; Hui, 2012). For example, setting shopping routes and mobile consumption patterns that connect with life phases, age, and family backgrounds creates specific meanings of shopping in a given context (Brembeck, Hansson, Lalanne, & Vayre, 2015). Even so, the role of mobile communication in the creation of shopping patterns and consumer cultures is relatively underappreciated in consumption studies.

This study focuses on the practical elements of mobile communication, namely, synchronization and microcoordination (Humphreys, 2007; Ling, 2004; Ling & Yttri, 2002), for the analysis of cross-border shopping. Synchronization refers to updating one’s purchasing activity, process, or movements on digital platforms in real time (e.g., WeChat or Weibo). Coordination refers to the act of adjusting one’s real-time location, orientation, purchasing target, or movements with others (i.e., customers and other shoppers). In this sense, this study not only explicates the nexus of place-making and mobilities’ complexities, but also applies mobile communication as a novel perspective through which to understand shopping.

Based on the aforementioned literature, this article explores three research questions:

Methodology

This article is based on ethnographic research on Chinese daigou conducted from March 2016 to May 2019. I collected information through participatory observations and online observations, along with 40 formal interviews, all of which were authorized by the informants. The data used in this paper come mainly from participatory observations of HK daigou and observations of daigou on WeChat. I further relied on follow-up formal semistructured interviews to triangulate my observations. The semistructured interviews were conducted in Chinese and lasted between half an hour and an hour, approximately. As interview materials are not included in the data analysis of this paper, I will not elaborate on the interviewing procedures here. Demographics such as personal shoppers’ sex, age, and place of residence are distinct: according to my observations and interviews, the typical image of an HK daigou practitioner is a woman in her 20s to 40s, living in Guangdong province in China or in HK. A considerable number of part-time personal shoppers are salespeople, office clerks, online entrepreneurs, homemakers, or overseas students. Due to space limitations, I present the detailed demographics of all participants in the supplemental material. ²

From March 2016 to December 2016, I participated in the weekly shopping trips of two sophisticated daigou practitioners who had run a business together for 3 years by 2016. I spent a whole day recording the itinerary and works of my informants across different sites between mainland China and HK, including TST, SS, Tin Shui Wai, Shenzhen Bay, Lo Wu, Lok Ma Chau, Sha Tin, Kwun Tong, and Shenzhen. I observed the work procedures, including traveling, contacting others, purchasing, carrying, and delivering commodities through customs checks. Through on-site participatory observations, I became familiar with the practical elements of daigou and had access to other practitioners. The two informants shared their business stories with me and guided my recruitment of participants. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, I conducted 2-month follow-up participatory observations with my key informants and other practitioners to supplement the preliminary observations.

I mainly conducted online observations on WeChat and Weibo because those platforms are representative and influential in China and host a considerable number of daigou accounts. By May 2018, there were 7,856,600 Weibo accounts associated with the keyword “daigou” (代购) and 600,972 with that label on their Weibo profiles. After scanning the daigou accounts that had attracted more than 10,000 followers, I randomly selected and followed about 100 accounts for a long period of online observation till 2019 May. I obtained WeChat daigou accounts via personal connections and fieldwork encounters. I followed the rationale of unobstructed observation and collected only those materials purposely presented for commercial use. I recorded everyday daigou practices such as creating profiles; placing orders; showing shoppers and shopping goods; and interacting with customers, shoppers, and suppliers. I also recorded online interactions between my informants, their customers, business partners, and peers, when we were shopping in HK. The digital materials quoted in this article consist of screenshots of public posts and group chats on WeChat.

I selectively combine digital materials and fieldnotes to depict features of daigou mobile communication. I identified those features as they repetitively appeared in fieldnotes, interview recordings, and screenshots. I acknowledge that the research processes and outcomes connect with my engagement with the settings, contexts, and daigou cultures, which affects the interpretive validity and reliability of the ethnography (Johnson & Altheide, 2011). Hence, I treat my presentation of ethnographic materials as a reflexive process, providing one, yet single, way to understand daigou. To facilitate scrutiny of my analytical work, I rely on reflexive writing strategies and reflexive discussions with informants. The paper presents both “raw materials” (fieldnotes) and my interpretations of them. I structure the paper based on the features of mobile purchasing derived from the inductive theorization of empirical materials, and I discuss the findings accordingly.

Mobile communicating place through embodied professionalism

Professionalism in this study refers to the conduct, aims, and qualities that characterize or mark “professional” daigou practitioners. Being or presenting oneself as a “professional daigou” is vital, since such a professional image promotes a long-term business brand. This section demonstrates that many shoppers associate their lining-up practices to buy assigned commodities in HK with the notions of assiduousness, competence, and mobile on-place professionalism. Such meaning-making creates common but place-based and context-specific ideas of embodied professionalism, which are facilitated by one’s synchronization and coordination of spatial movements with digital travel.

Lining up in shopping festivals and adjusting mobilities for distant customers

It was the opening day of Thankful Week at SOGO, the largest Japanese-style department store in HK, which holds the most influential shopping festivals for daigou (see Figure 1). I saw my informant Amy release a post on WeChat “Moments” (a digital interface similar to Facebook’s timeline) saying, “Hi girls, I’m gonna be in a fight for the SOGO. Everybody adds more orders, please.” I arrived at the store before its opening at 10:00 o’clock and saw that many other people stood at the entrance of the store. In recent years, during Thankful Week, department stores in Causeway Bay and TST have been crowded with daigou and tourists from mainland China.

My first task was to purchase the eye cream set of Estée Lauder, an American brand, which cost HK$450.00 ³ (50% discount). When the store opened, people poured in. When I arrived at the counter of Estée Lauder, I waited in a line of 40 to 50 people. Each person in the line was allowed to buy only four packages of each set. The huge discounts of Estée Lauder had attracted many shoppers. Each shopper there seemed to scramble for the discounted sets first. Within 1 hour, the staff announced that the HK$450.00 set was sold out before I got one. My WeChat was suddenly occupied by discussions of Estée Lauder’s products by daigou practitioners. It was said that the franchised brand’s counters were deliberately to limit the sales volumes of super discounted sets each day, to attract more shoppers to join the line. The shoppers at SOGO were enraged by such market misconduct. They reported this live online in TST and Causeway Bay, accusing Estée Lauder counters of playing bad marketing tricks. One shopper was outraged: “We have been lining up for two or three hours but can buy only two or three pieces of each set (today is very strict). Don’t provide the offers if you cannot afford to offer them!”

All shoppers complained about the brands’ unreasonable marketing tricks and the time-consuming and laborious shopping process of Thankful Week in different ways, but no one quit the line-ups. Instead, most shoppers stressed efficiency and hard work to manage their consumption tasks during Thankful Week. In one post, Monica, who had participated in SOGO sales three times, said, “the SOGO is crowded for sure. During my purchasing processes, no bargain, no consultant, no voice call. Just send me the list of your orders.” Many shoppers also stated that they earned little money during their participation in SOGO’s sales. However, they stressed that professional daigou should bear the tumult and competition of the malls and complete the tasks, as demonstrated in the following example (see Figure 2).

Buying a set with a special discount is not easy work as you guys thought.

A purchase of localness through lining up in HK

Aside from shopping festivals, the “fight” for local-brand products commonly erupts among HK daigou, such as in the competition to procure moon cake gift boxes and snacks. My informants and I visited many different places, lined up, bought the freshest locally produced goods, carefully packaged the products, and sent them by quick delivery. Consuming local-brand products relates to the constructed and perceived ideas of commodity quality and image that I describe as conveying a sense of the “localness” of HK products. Personal purchasing of local products in HK is regarded not only as cheaper and more efficient, but as a fresher and more authentic way of consuming such perceived “localness,” constructed through the branding of HK products. Such localness signifies social values that adopt places’ meanings (Miller et al., 1998; Urry, 1995). Communication of one’s mobile purchase activities conveys such symbolic consumption. Hence my informants tried to present their lining up, as a form of evidence, whenever we were shopping in local stores.

For daigou practitioners, purchasing HK-produced moon cakes has become an almost year-round activity. From June 2016—about four months ahead of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival—my informants began to buy coupons for moon cakes. Starting in June, we updated information about moon cake gift boxes and our progress in shopping. I was sent weekly to the Peninsula Boutique, a store at the luxury hotel, to seek pre-sale ticket/coupon that would be sold out within minutes when the store opened at 8:00 a.m. I kept in touch with my informants and customers while I was lining up. One day, after I had just confirmed the orders of the Star Chef Mooncake Gift Box (HK$1,088.00) and another new gift box (HK$998.00) from a customer, the salespeople told me that the boxes were sold out. My informant, Amy, was quite desperate and said, “He is an important customer that we cannot offend. He ordered mooncakes as gifts for others for three years.” She stressed, “His only requirement is the expensive and branded mooncakes in HK.” Eventually, we had to pay more money to order the pricey gift boxes from a wholesaler. To my surprise, the customer was not bothered by our final solution. Personal shopping still made sense to this customer, as we certified that the products were originally produced and purchased in HK. Lining up for gift boxes was meaningful too in the sense that we professionally performed personal shopping to get products from the assigned shop in HK. Similar situations happened repetitively. As with Thankful Week, purchasing cost-effective or expensive moon cake boxes for various customers showcases the excellent quality of professional HK daigou. The practice of lining up on-site symbolizes the consumption of HK’s “localness” and the presumed quality of its products.

To conclude, the lining-up practices of daigou represent the shoppers’ embodied professionalism, facilitated by synchronization of physical presence, spatial movements, and consumption of the material and symbolic place of HK. The mobile communicating place of daigou influences the connections between spatial mobility and meaning-making of HK, which validates the suffering, diligence, and cross-border existence of daigou practitioners. HK, in this consumer cultural context, is a physical and symbolic locale of global and trans-local commodity flow.

Communicative mobilities based on the dis/embeddedness of purchasing procedures in two places

This section depicts how shoppers’ patterns of synchronization and coordination correspond with the differential shopping facilities of HK. I compare purchasing procedures in TST and SS, based on participatory observations with informants (for whom I assigned the pseudonyms Amy, Bob, and Cindy). I show that the dis/embeddedness of mobile purchasing within places in HK is crucial to understand the interactions between daigou’s mobilities, consumption in and of places, and the role of mobile communication. Dis/embeddedness here refers to the extent of closeness between the organization of purchasing procedures and HK markets (including market rhythms, channels of commodity supply, and on-site shopping facilities).

Mobile communication based on hierarchy (intangible) in Tsim Sha Tsui

Located in Kowloon island, TST is a major tourist hub in HK, which contains several financial centers and has had a developed tertiary sector since colonial times. As the map shows, pharmacies and wholesalers (discount and wholesale products), chain stores and shopping malls (generic brand products), and luxury brand counters (high-end brand products) consist of three types of stores in TST (see Figure 3). The areas labeled from A to H are shopping centers that contain hundreds of franchised brand counters and high-end luxury products (on the map, only famous brands were marked by Google Maps), which my informant and I frequently visited at the time I conducted my fieldwork.

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Figure 1.

SOGO's TST Thankful Week.

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Figure 2.

Shopping scenes at SOGO's Thankful Week.

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Figure 3.

Shopping map of Tsim Sha Tsui.

The shopping setting of TST is based on “vertical relations,” meaning that shops of different business types that provide various consumer goods (i.e., wholesale shops, chain stores, local products, franchised brand counters, and high-end luxuries) together constitute the commodity suppliers of mainland Chinese daigou. The vertical arrangement of shops affect the shopping routes and the paths and pace of daigou practitioners’ real-time movements in their purchasing practices. Figure 4 OPEN IN VIEWER

In mobile purchasing, shoppers’ movements and coordination with partners and clients are adjusted as they go through the different shops. Figure 4 shows that shopping in wholesale shops and chain stores is a relatively swift procedure, as shoppers usually go there to collect easily accessible and preordered commodities. Daigou practitioners, like my informants, spend more time purchasing and broadcasting online when they are at franchised counters and popular stores. Sometimes they linger in a store or move back and forth between stores, simultaneously chatting with customers via digital platforms as they try to get additional orders in real time. They normally line up in TST, because many commodities and stores there are geocoded, which is also the case in similar HK landmarks such as Peninsula HK, Jenny Bakery, and niche brands and luxury stores at Harbour City.

My informants synchronize real-time movements with contacts on digital platforms to certify and boost their businesses. They update their location at stores (such as malls and franchised counters) as well as information about each store at which they are shopping. Synchronization of movements with customers makes shoppers’ on-site spatial mobility a crucial reference point for customers from a distance. Customers trace real-time locations and contact shoppers via digital platforms to participate in the mobile purchasing processes. After checking out, my informants put all of the commodities on a service counter and take pictures of each one of them. They update location-based posts as well as photos of shops and commodities to visualize spatial mobilities in TST synchronously, as in the following sample posts.

Post A:

Stay in “Loushang” [a chain store in HK] for half an hour, if you want to add orders, please text me personally.

Lancome pink liquid is on sale…

400ml RMB 200ml RMB 168

Rarely it’s in store today, come on!!

Post B:

Estee Lauder, done, each person can buy four sets only!

Pictures and location:

SOGO, picture1: Estee Lauder set; picture2: Estee Lauder

Mobile communication based on trans-locally proximate shops in Sheung Shui

Located in northern HK, SS is only one train station away from the Lo Wu and Lok Ma Chau customs checkpoints. Purchasing commodities in SS can make for the fastest possible shopping trip to HK, between 2 and 3 hours, for the residents who live near the border. Border towns like SS have experienced a soaring parallel trading and mushrooming daigou shops since the 2000s, depending on their trans-local proximity to mainland China. Transformed overnight from a sleepy town to the “parallel trading hub,” SS has become a site of protest against mainland visitors and parallel traders. SS thus realizes its role as a place in-between. For daigou practitioners, SS is a gateway to purchase HK overseas commodities. For HK residents, SS is a place to be reclaimed from mainland Chinese (Ng & Nip, 2012).

Figure 5 is based on a 1:1 scale of the TST map. Three shopping malls have the major brand counters of SS. Hundreds of wholesale shops are densely located on SS streets, as shown on a wholesaler’s map (see Figure 6). The overall image of SS suggests a premodern village far away from a neon-lit shopping paradise such as TST. Stores are located on the first floor of three- or four-floor self-build residential blocks. The place is obviously not designed for tourists—it has only small grocery stores and has sparse tourist facilities (e.g., restaurants). The word-of-mouth evaluation of SS is not as positive as that of TST, considering commodity sources and the differential profits between parallel trading and purchasing at chain stores or franchised counters. Hearsay suggests that knock-off cosmetics, make-up, and medicines made in China are transported to SS and resold by HK sellers.

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Figure 5.

Shopping map of Sheung Shui.

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Figure 6.

Sheung Shui shops map made by a wholesaler.

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Figure 7.

Moving and mobile communication in Sheung Shui.

Mobile purchasing in SS is conditioned by shops’ “horizontal arrangement”; more specifically, wholesale shops that provide similar types of consumer goods represent the commodity suppliers for overseas commodity shopping in China. Based on the horizontal arrangement of the shops, purchasing activities are conducted by circularly moving around the shops on the streets. Figure 7 sketches each shop we visited, the time we spent at the shop, and the mobile communications that corresponded with the purchasing processes in one of my field trips. Most of the shops at which we lingered were pharmacies and wholesale stores. I labelled the shops that we visited more than twice (see the circled names in Figure 7), which reflects the circular movements of the purchasing process. As Figure 7 suggests, there is no complicated route planning in SS nor are there many schedule changes in the itinerary. We have ample time to go back and forth between shops within half a day.

In SS, synchronization and coordination are mainly based on “spot goods” (the on-hand stock). Shoppers synchronize commodity information, especially inventories, with customers, peers, and suppliers via digital platforms. The circular moving patterns and real-time commodity-based communication, accounts for the horizontal model of wholesale shops and the trans-local proximity of SS. Stores in SS are tiny, making it difficult to display all of the goods. Pharmacies’ front rooms are used mainly for check-out and pick-up goods. Therefore, almost all of the shops have created WeChat accounts to launch new products, offers, and provide inventory information. The shops sell homogeneous commodity categories and brands, which are presented as “hot” products on Taobao, Weibo, and WeChat. Purchasers directly search stores’ WeChat accounts and see what products are available, as prices and inventories are updated via this platform. “Spot goods” are the primary choices for real-time promotion, as shops try to make good use of the inventory information. After confirming both the consumers’ side and the wholesaler’s side, shoppers go one by one to the stores in SS.

Despite being able to receive updated commodity information from wholesalers, personal shoppers usually need to personally visit SS to purchase consumer goods, as homogeneous inventories run out of stock quickly. WeChat posts provide updated inventory information within 1 or 2 hours. In SS, I was part of a line-up scene based on the synchronization of commodity information. Cindy and I stood separate in line because each person could buy only two pieces of Clarins Double Serum at the shop (a best-seller that can be sold out in many brand counters simultaneously).

A man: Do you have Armani 405 [a kind of lipstick]?

Shop assistant: The brand counter has. Now it is too popular. We charge HK$305.00 in our store [which is much higher than the price at the brand counter].

Author: Do you have the set of Soo Yoon Lotion [a product by Whoo]?

Shop assistant: We don’t have.

Author: I saw you post an advertisement at 10:00 a.m.

Shop assistant: Sold out.

To conclude, personal shoppers shift synchronization and microcoordination patterns to appropriate mobilities, based on the material and symbolic spaces of HK. In TST, shoppers move around and strategically coordinate with others to show the commodities’ mobilities along with their own mobilities. While in SS, shoppers and shops synchronize the commodity supply in real time; thus, shoppers purchase “spot goods,” outperforming objects’ spatial and digital mobility. The distinct patterns of synchronization and coordination in TST and SS differentiate the place-inscribed communicative mobilities of shoppers and commodities. TST is both an international and local-brand tourist center, while SS has risen as a new “parallel trading hub.”

Conclusion

This paper complicates the conventional notions of microcoordination and synchronization regarding how they refresh place-making and mobility practices. The exploration of the place–mobility nexus reflects the distinct nature of mobile communication, that is, communicative possibilities across contexts afforded by the spatial mobility of media devices and carriers as mobile termini (Campbell, 2013; Helles, 2013; Jensen, 2013; Ling, 2004). I argue that mobile communication processes/practices create variable interactions between mobility and place in cross-border shopping, reflected as mobile communicating place and place-inscribed communicative mobilities. Daigou practitioners’ mobile media communication shapes the consumer culture of HK daigou that is anchored by the multiplicity of places and mobilities of people, data, and objects.

First, shoppers’ mobilities can be translated into social and material forms of place-making practices, adding meaning to identity formation, positioning, and exhibition. Purchasing practices are considered to require labor, competence, and mobility in HK. The valuation of lining-up practices depends on mobile communicating HK as a global-local hub of overseas commodities and consumption of place (Urry, 1995). Personal shoppers create the embodied professionalism of daigou—a type of “spatial selves” (Schwartz & Halegoua, 2015)—through digital expressions of mobilities in their mobile communicating HK. The findings suggest that mobile communication goes beyond informational coordination on-the-move, entailing also expressive and performative dimensions (Ling & Yttri, 2002) in the meaning-making of one’s physical presence, experience, and mobilities in shopping space (Lehtonen & Mäenpää, 2000). The embodied professionalism of daigou contributes to the valuation of bodily mobility, location-based self-representation, and meaning-making of place, together reinforcing the cultural perception of regional differences in global consumer goods, namely the power geometry of shopping spaces (Massey, 1993).

Second, HK material settings and the locations’ (TST and SS) meanings prescribe mobility patterns of personal shopping. HK daigou entails a multiplicity and complexity of relational places (Massey, 2005). TST represents the ideal image of a shopping site from Chinese people’s perspective, where the physical presence and mobilities of shoppers “consume” the place. SS acts as a nonplace (Augé, 1995) of HK—a border zone or trans-local warehouse that does not confer the feeling of being in HK—where people’s mobilities serve only to get overseas commodities rather than a purchase of or in the place. This finding resonates with the characterization of mobile place or space-making (e.g., Farman, 2012; de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014) and the dual space-making of HK in mobile communication (Choy, 2018), while it also suggests alternative correlation of mobilities and places in mobile communication practices/processes. This particular nexus of mobilities and place-making practices demonstrates that mobilities of media and people are not only place dynamics and space-making practices, but also constitute variable place and space relations.

In conclusion, this study shows that an alternative consumer culture takes shape in the variable synchronization and microcoordination patterns of mainland China–HK personal shopping. Personal shoppers were almost invisible, existing on a very limited scale in China before the digital era; thus, the stabilization of the daigou niche market and cross-border mobile purchasing would not exist without digital practices like self-representation, trading, interacting, and permanent mobile communication via Chinese social media platforms. Similar increases in the numbers of daigou practitioners have also appeared in Australia, America, Japan, and Russia (e.g., Martin, 2017; Zhang, 2015). The ethnography of daigou practices illustrates a renewed sense-making of HK and the digital and bodily engagement with shopping spaces, which choreographs spatial mobilities, digital travel, mobilities of objects, and place-based identity expression. In addition, I have shown that the meaning-making of places and mobilities performance echo specific dominant ideas of market barriers, regional differences, and global flows of labor and commodities across mainland China, HK, pan-Asian countries, and the broader world, which reflects how power configurations articulate with spatial relations (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). In this sense, although this paper cannot extend to discussions of broader politics of im/mobilities and spaces (e.g., Hannam et al., 2006; Massey, 2005, 1993), the findings concerning the impacts of mobile communication processes/practices reflect the power relations embedded in the mobilities and spatial relations of cross-border shopping practices (Martin, 2017; Xie, 2018; Xie & Witteborn, 2019).

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