Buying Tips for Tiangge in the Philippines

Tiangge is another term for a place where you can buy a lot of goods and stuff for a relatively very low price. They are not just your ordinary retail store. Tiangge is very popular in the Philippines. Almost anywhere, you can find these Tiangge spots most especially on palengke (market) and occasionally on places with fiesta (festivity season).

Since Tiangge is a place where in you can buy variety of stuff, I ran into a short collection of some of the tips when buying on Tiangge. These are mostly based from my own experiences.

• Make a list of the items you need/want to buy. It’s a basic for every shopping quest. Writing the items you’ll going to buy is really a smart move. This will save you time; without a doubt.
• Wear your most comfortable outfit. On rare cases, when luck is not really onto you, you can see yourself budging with a lot of other customers that are buying from Tiangge’s as well. Thus being on your most comfortable outfit adds ease on shopping.
• Make “tawad” or simply bid/ask for a lower price, always. This is why Tiangge is really good. You can make “tawad” or ask for discount on the items you want to buy. You can bid with the seller a lower price of the item. Do not worry; it’s just normal for Tiangge in the Philippines. For example, when you had asked for the price of an item, and the merchant says something like P180, you can ask if you can buy it for just P150. If you really want to save, then you should always do something like that for every item you wanted to buy from the Tiangge.
• Keep safe. While the Tiangge is a very public place to buy things, still it is not that secured just like your favorite shopping malls and sometimes there are people who are really into making dirty things; chancing on your stuff. It’s better to be always alert, attentive and safe.

Tiangge is also called sedera/cedera on some places here in the Philippines.  Our culture might have inherited this since the Spanish occupation on our country. Tiangge is definitely a good place to check out when wise shopping and saving more is desired, here in the Philippines. However, tiangge’s cannot promise to provide you all the stuff you wanna shop, but still it may almost have it all. When you are in the Philippines, be sure to check out the tiangge’s in your locals. Trust me; you can save more from buying in tiangge rather than in shopping malls where tax rules your budget for shopping.

This post is a guest post by Ian Austria. He also writes and shares some pretty cool collection of merchandise at ShopBuyWise.com –his considered online Tiangge for online shoppers. You can find rare and geek stuff that you might also wanted to buy online, as featured by the site.