Luxury skin-care fair turns into a nightmare

By Liang Yiwen  |   2008-12-8  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

A sales fair offering luxury skin-care products with discounts of up to 70 percent suddenly moved from its original address on Friday and turned into circus so chaotic that the police had to shut it down.

Changning District police are now investigating the Biotherm Company and say it could face major fines.

Originally the fair was to be open from 10am on Friday in an office building on Huashan Road in Jing'an District. But at the last minute the fair was moved to a room on Dingxi Road in Changning District.

Many customers were irate at the last-minute change but rushed to the new address anyway.

"I was unhappy but I immediately caught a taxi to the new address," said Da Liping, who had taken time off work to go to the fair.

She made it to the Dingxi Road venue by 10am but was shocked to find hundreds of people queuing in a yard and up the stairs to the room where the fair was meant to be.

Although the yard was large, the room on the second floor where the fair was staged only measured about 20 square meters, according to Da.

Da and the shoppers around her were bitterly disappointed and tried to get people at the front of the queue to buy things for them but the scene quickly dissolved into complete chaos as more and more arrived for the bargains.

By 10:30am, the police arrived on the scene, decided the beauty-care fair was far from beautiful, and closed it down, concerned about crowd safety.

But bargain hunters are pretty determined and angry when they missed out on the bargains - especially those who had taken a day off work, found the address changed and had to line up for hours in the cold before it opened.

Careful research

"I had researched their products carefully and made a shopping list," said Da angrily. She felt she had been conned and thought that the company might just have been staging a promotion and not a genuine fair.