Tailor Shops and Dodgy Salesmen in Phuket Thailand

If you have ever been to Phuket before, you would have come across the dreaded tailor shops which are concentrated all over the place. Every one of these tailor shops, has a dodgy guy or several dodgy guys standing out the front of them and these guys are extremely annoying and if you were to walk around in the main areas of Patong, Kata or Karon, you will be confronted by several of these guys as you walk past.

The guys who stand out the front of these tailor shops, are always immigrants which seem to come from Nepal and Burma and these guys have cunning and sneaky ways to try and get you to stop for a talk. Some of the ways they try to get you to stop is, they try to guess what nationality you are and once they realize where you come from, they try to use that countries slang in an attempt to get on the same wavelength. Once they think they are on side with you, they will usually reach out and try to get you to shake their hand and once you shake their hand, they have you not walking anymore and once you are stopped, it's hard to get away from them.
When you are stopped there talking to the dodgy salesmen, they will ask you for a suit and if you are not interested, they will quickly try and shift the conversation to talk about something else to keep you there and they will ask you lots of questions to keep your mind off the fact that they have already asked you for a suit. Once these sneaky salesman think that they have used their skills to get on side with you, they will ask again if you want a suit and try and lure you inside. They never seem to give up and will ask you again and again if you walk past.
If you are interested in a suit, then you can get good, cheap - fake suits that look like original brand name suits. Once you step into one of these places you are pretty much stuck there and even if you are there to buy a suit, they don't want to let you go and will try to push you to buy more suits.

The prices in these shops vary and these sneaky salesman will always try to elevate the prices first, hoping that you will just pay it without any bargaining and haggling. Always haggle them, as they get these suits made dirt cheap in local sweat shops by illegal immigrants, who can produce them for next to nothing. Don't feel that if you pay the salesman more, the sweat shop workers are going to get more, because they wont, the money will just go to the salesman.

If you are not interested in a suit and you are walking past a bunch of tailor shops, make sure that you don't stop and if they try to shake your hand, just say "No Suit" and don't put your hand out, just keep walking. It's best to just ignore them and try not to make eye contact, just look somewhere else and most of the time, they will focus on someone else.