After living in San Francisco, and primarily living in Nob Hill which is adjacent to China Town, you find that the Chinese people here are very frugal. After having lived and traveled all over Asia, I had a good idea of this, however as generalizations go, you can’t say all are. After all, most of the mercedes and bmw’s are being driven by those ‘frugal’ Chinese. But, the sight I saw tonight was at the other end of the spectrum.
On my way to the gym, I saw a Chinese woman with her SF jacket which retails for about $9 all over Fisherman’s wharf, with kitchen tongs. She was hunched over the side walk picking up smoked cigarettes to see if they had any tobacco left in them for smoking later on. She had a plastic bag full of these partially smoked cigarettes. My first thought was wow, what people will do for a smoke. But then my second thought, wow, how cheap can you get?