The Anthropology of East Europe Review
VOLUME 12,  Numbers , ,1994
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PRICE AND STATUS IN VIENNA'S NASCHMARKT.  
ROBERT ROTENBERG
DePaul University
In his recent analysis of economic behavior in markets Stuart Plattner neatly argues for distinguishing between the atomized, impersonal transactions which have no meaning to beyond the exchange itself, and the personalized transactions between people whose relationship with each other is embedded in a network of social relations and endures beyond the exchange.    Plattner demonstrates that embedded transactions are economically superior in certain environments.  namely those where the transaction itself involves a high degree of perceived risk.  In such environments traders require greater information about the trading partner and the specific facts of the proposed deal.  Personalized relationships between traders provide an extra measure of security to the exchange. 
Risk arises in transactions because of faulty information about goods, misunderstandings over the rules of the exchange, and lack of trust between the people involved.  While formal economic models assume full information about goods, transactions and actors, in the real world, Plattner argues, this information is always imperfect and incomplete.  Take the problem of buying a used car.  Buyers must evaluate two different aspects of the vehicle.  The first.  referred to as the "search" aspect, concerns those characteristics of style, size, or color which fulfill the buyer's desires in a car.  The second, referred to as the "experience quality" of the goods, are those attributes which goods reveal about themselves only after they are used, such as freshness or durability (Nelson 1970).  The used car seller knows the experience quality the vehicle, while the buyer's task is to deduce that quality.  The vehicle may be of normal durability for its age, or it may be a "lemon.  " The risk in the exchange is that the buyer and the seller do not have the same information about the value of the vehicle.  Buying a friend's used car, however, resolves this problem by permitting the buyer to evaluate the experience value of the goods.  If the car proves to be less durable that was originally assumed, the price can be re-negotiated.  When this possibility does not exist, used car buyers must either depend on the reputation of dealer, pay to evaluate the vehicle themselves.  take the risk of buying a lemon, or stay out of the market. 
It is not enough to know how the price relates to the experience of consuming the goods, the context of the sale must also be taken into account.  This is true, for example, when unexpected scarcity forces sellers to mark up the price or to sell the goods "under the counter.  " Even under these circumstances.  Iong-term relationships with sellers assure buyers of a supply and often at normal prices.  The context of the transaction may also specify what things can be exchanged and the time frame for payment.  Free gift wrapping, payment on credit, home delivery, and return privileges are examples of goods and services added to the transaction that affect price.  Once again, long-term relationships between buyer and seller prompt the inclusion of more goods and services in each transaction than is the case for impersonal exchanges.  As risk increases, the most important thing to know about the actors is their social identity.  Sometimes one only has to know who a trader is to know what he is buying and selling.    At other times, knowing the social identity can permit the establishment of fictive kin or community ties, mutual acquaintances, shared ethnic or religious affiliations, or shared class backgrounds.  If I can convince a used car dealer that there is the possibility in the future that we will meet again in another social context, the time of the transaction is potentially extendible.  There is a greater likelihood that the dealer will offer a car with high potential experience value, known as a "plum.  "I want to use Plattner's ideas about behavior in markets to understand a striking feature of Vienna's Naschmarkt, a permanent outdoor market near the center of the city.  
This market has existed in the city since 1774.    The market is often mentioned along with the musical tradition.  the wine gardens St.  Stephan's Cathedral.  and the coffee houses as one of Vienna's most distinctive features.  It enjoys the reputation of having the greatest variety of fruits, vegetables, grains.  cheese.  fish and meats of any market in the city.  It is laid out along a broad center strip between the two lanes of a main traffic artery.  The strip is actually the ceiling of a vault the covers the regulated channel of the Vienna river as it flows to the Danube.  The market area extends over a distance of three city blocks. 
One feature of the Naschmarkt that has always fascinated me is the social and economic polarization of the market space.  At the end of the market that is closest to the city center.  known as the upper market even though is at the base of a slow rise in elevation, people who speak an educated German staff the market stalls, the greatest variety of goods are offered for sale, and the prices are among the highest in the city.  At the other end of the market, known as the lower market even though it lies on the slope of the elevation, are stalls that are often staffed by people who speak German with foreign accents, where the variety of goods is more limited and the prices are among the lowest in the city.  Market ordinances require that sellers include the quality classifications of the meats and produce on the signs that advertise the price.  This allows buyers to compare the prices of the same class of produce.    Both ends of the market, as well as the mixed characteristics of stalls in the middle section.  are thriving.  My fascination with this place has always centered on the co-existence of the two successful market segments in the same location, the higher priced, high variety one and lower priced, limited variety one.  Who buys what, in which end of the market, and why?
Food markets contain as much risk as used car markets.   In spite of the best efforts of the inspectors, the buyer cannot know the experience quality of the goods until after the purchase.  Tomatoes may be tasteless.  Meat or fish may be less than fresh.  Apples or flour may be wormy.  Melons may not be ripe.  Faced with this risks, buyers have the same three choices.  The first is not to enter the market the at all, or not to buy the goods that are offered.  Neighborhood supermarkets offer standardized quality goods at average prices.   These are by far the most often used provisioning markets in the city.    Standardized quality means less variety, older goods, and in the case of fruits and vegetables, marked tastelessness.   The second choice is to buy larger quantities at the lowest prices possible.  This may also require buying a lower class of produce.  With this choice.  the buyers lower their expectations of the experience quality of the goods and instead enjoy a lower price than that of the supermarkets.  The third choice is to buy a smaller quantity at the higher prices of the upper market.  This insures that one is buying the highest quality produce available that day.  Risk is minimized and the experience quality of the goods is optimized. 
Some Viennese of my acquaintance use both ends of the market.  They employ the lower market strategy when shopping for themselves on a day to day basis, reserving the upper market strategy for provisions that will be served for guests.  There are many Viennese, however.  who employ only one or the other of the these strategies.  For them, the choice of market strategy is linked to considerations that transform the rational calculus of risk management into the symbolic calculus of metropolitan identity, status, and class.  These single-strategy shoppers form alliances with shopkeepers, thus sustaining Plattner's model of market behavior.  The behaviors are justified by the participants in terms that combine consideration of risk with considerations of identity in such a way that one is never quite sure which value structure is of greater importance, the microeconomic or the micro social.  At the very least, the justifications of why one shops upper market or lower market demonstrate the symbolic constructions through which urbanites articulate their own market rationality. 
The Naschmarkt
In this short presentation, I can only introduce to a few of the people who shared their experiences with the Naschmarkt with me.  I will select one person who employs the upper market strategy only, since these are among the more symbolically invested Naschmarkt shoppers.  Up until the death of her husband some years ago, Vera shopped in the Naschmarkt every week and always on a Wednesday.  She bought sausage from Urbanek, fruit and vegetables from Sappa, and fish from Gruba.   These are among the most expensive shops in the upper market.  She characterized shopping is an intimate affair.  For her, the food that one consumes requires the same degree of consideration that one might give to clothing, medical care, hygiene.  or sexuality.  She was drawn to the upper market because of the reduced risk in the experience quality of things she bought there.  These three shops had the best merchandise.  She raved about the quality of Urbanek's Leberwurst, a pate so subtle and smooth that one could eat it with a spoon instead of spreading it on bread.  The prices were high, but the service was extraordinary.  This was not the only reason for shopping there.  She reported that the shopkeepers called her by the honorific title of Frau Doktor, acknowledging her status as a member of Vienna's upper middle class.   The shopkeepers kept track of the day of the week when she shopped.  They would often give her things to sample.  At Urbanek's delicatessen, she might enjoy a glass of wine.  Large purchases at Sappa's were sent home by messenger to save her the indignity of having to carry them herself.  One shopkeeper was a amateur counselor and gave personal advice to the customers she knew well.  This shopkeeper kept a few chairs in the back of her shop where the customers could sit and talk as the clerks filled their orders.  Vera also said that the people she met while shopping appealed to her.  She often met other prominent people.  She mentioned a well-known contemporary composer as a fellow patron who often shopped at the same day and time as she.  The picture that emerges of the upper market from her account is one in which people with means can enjoy the highest quality goods from shopkeepers who acknowledge their status and in the company of other high status shoppers. 
I then spoke with Vera's favorite shopkeeper, Maria.  Her stand offers the Viennese shopper the best quality and the best selection.  Naturally the prices are a bit higher.  Her customers know that they will receive the best service and the best goods.  Her goods are attractive, fresh and there is always an exciting selection.    She offers her customers coffee, or a wine spritzer in summer and a schnapps in winter.  I asked her about the lower market and why anyone would shop there if they got such good service from shopkeepers like Urbanek and Sappa.  She thinks that the difference in the customers lies in their ethnicity.  The Turks and Russians go to their ethnic stands because they feel comfortable with the service they receive there.  They are favored by their co-ethnic shopkeepers who give the best quality goods.  People who are not co-ethnics receive only ordinary quality goods.    My observations bear out her remarks.  One often sees and hears customers and clerks addressing each other in other languages in the lower market, but these same minority shoppers are never seen in the upper market.  Maria says that she would do the same thing if she was in a foreign land and found a Viennese shopkeeper. 
This view from the upper market is not shared by shopkeepers in the middle and lower markets.  Georg is a shopkeeper in the middle market, a mixed bag of specialty shops that link the produce stands of the upper and lower segments.  His view of the upper market is that it appeals to the older customers of the Naschmarkt.  They have been shopping at the market for decades.  In the last fifteen years, the number of shops where they can get quality goods has shrunk.  Austrian shopkeepers who had managed stands since the end of World War II began to sell them to Turkish and Russian immigrants in the 1960s and 70s.    He told of one sale where a Russian paid six million schillings in cash for a shop ($500,000).  He says that the high price was justified only if the shopkeeper cuts comers, such as buying older vegetables that no one else wants and selling them for a price that undercuts the competition.  This is illegal, but hard to prove.  People can't recognize old vegetables and buy them thinking that they are getting a bargain. 
Whether this fraud actually takes place, as this shopkeeper believes it does, is irrelevant.  He is articulating the heightened risk that upper market shoppers perceive in the lower market.  The key here is the demographic change in the shopkeepers.  The new entrepreneurs are not Viennese.  They are able to buy stands in cash from who knows what sources.  For the wealthier, high status Viennese, there is something unknown and not quite proper about the lower market stalls.  Therefore, transactions with them are riskier.  One simply cannot take their offers at face value.  One woman of my acquaintance who shops in the upper market articulated a commonly held belief that the lower market was run by the Mafia.  This is another way of talking about the differences in perceived risk between the two market segments.  This risk does not apply to Russian or Turkish shoppers in the lower market.  By conducting their transactions in the same language as the shopkeeper or his clerks the Viennese believe that the co-ethnics can realize substantial quality at low cost.  The shopkeeper who might readily cheat a Viennese would not so readily cheat one of his own.  This view reinforces the high status Viennese sense of comfort when dealing with high status shopkeepers in the upper market. 
There are other views of the differences between the market segments in addition to the issues of quality, social recognition and ethnic boundaries just described.  One produce agent I spoke with saw the Naschmarkt as a link between the old Vienna and the new.  Old Vienna is bourgeois and central city oriented, while the new Vienna is working class and suburb oriented.    These communities meet in the Naschmarkt.  The divisions in the market reflect the divisions between the two cultural classes.    The tensions that the old Viennese feel when they enter the lower market are those of crossing a cultural boundary and entering a different life-style.  For this agent, the Viennese experience encompasses both life-styles.  even if individual Viennese feel comfortable only within their own.  Both markets use German as the market language.  In the upper market the interaction begins in unaccented, educated German until the shopper begins to use Viennese dialect, a signal of ethnic solidarity between the shopper and the shopkeeper.    In the lower market, the transaction begins in accented, uneducated German until the shopper switches the clerks language. 
In both cases, the shift from the standard market language to a specialized language is a statement about the social category of the actors.  People who cannot switch into the specialized language cannot mobilize social category as part of their overall strategy to reduce risk.  For those who can make the shift, the mechanism is an appeal to social solidarity through shared knowledge.  In the case of the shift to Viennese dialect, the solidarity is one of shared metropolitan knowledge.  Only native born Viennese and those who grew up in the neighborhoods can speak the dialect idiomatically and with the proper phonemic values.  Only true Viennese speak Viennese.  In the case of the shift to Turkish, Russian, Urdu, or Serbo-Croatian, the solidarity is one of shared ethnic knowledge and minority status within Vienna.  Only co-ethnics can speak the ethnic language.  Viennese who have learned these ethnic languages through education or travel are curiosities for the ethnic shopkeepers Using the ethnic language does not automatically insure reduced risk until the shopper has returned week after week.  This commitment to loyalty to a single ethnic shopkeeper mimics the loyalty of high status Viennese to the high status shopkeeper of the upper market.  Both Viennese who control ethnic languages and Viennese who remain loyal to a single ethnic food stand are rare. 
Another produce agent with long experience in the Naschmarkt offered a stylistic reason for the existence of the market segments.  The upper market caters to the native Viennese need for beautiful things.  They like things to be well presented.  This appeal to beauty is another way in which the Viennese symbolize the difference between risk and high experience quality.  Beautiful things splendidly presented require time and effort.  They also require that the shopkeeper possess the template for those design patterns that are meaningful to Viennese and the knowledge of what characteristics those Viennese who are attracted to "beautiful things," are searching for.  This is another variety metropolitan knowledge.  To possess it means that one is a true Viennese.  Transactions with such a person assure lower risk 
One Russian-Armenian entrepreneur with whom I spoke owned two shops in the Naschmarkt one in the lower market and one in the middle market.  For him, the perceived differences in quality were an illusion.  He sensed that those who frequent the upper market exclusively are buying a well-designed image.  The only difference, as he saw it, lay in the guarantied variety of goods offered for sale.  Everything is available when people need it.  They can buy pure, high quality products.  Many of the shops have cultivated a feeling of specialization and the customers consider the shopkeepers to be experts.  In the lower market, there is not the same effort to carry everything all the time.  He insisted that his stands sell exactly the same goods whether they are located in the lower market or the middle market.  The location in the middle market does allow him to offer goods for sale at a one or two percent higher price.  He was quite pleased to be part of a market in which people will buy at any price in the higher end of the market.   
Summary
In urban markets, there are special considerations that apply to the assessment of risk, such as ethnic tensions, majority and minority relations, and class relations.  These are added to the feeling of risk that already exists in exchanges of goods between strangers where the experience quality of the goods cannot be known until after the exchange is completed.  My observations in Vienna's Naschmarkt suggest that urbanites manage this risk by attempting to extend the transaction ahead in time.  Through return visits to the same food stand and knowledge of the social category of the seller, they seek to guarantee freshness of the food and validation of their status in the community. 
Participation in the market is open to the public.  One set of rules for buying food requires shoppers to walk slowly up and down the crowded street between stalls seeking the lowest price for the highest quality goods.  A second set of rules reduces the time and effort required by investing socially in an on-going person relationship with a shop owner.  Viennese negotiate social status through these ties.  Each shopper seeks his or her own social level among the shopkeepers, using language, titles, and in the upper market, a willingness to pay more than necessary for goods to establish the relationship.  Vendors derive market position and their own internal status in the market community from the quality of their customers.  
This status hierarchy coincides with the relative price of goods, perceived product quality, and customer service.   Behavior in urban markets involves dynamic interactions between actors, transaction rules and goods in the behavior of urban markets.  There is not one set of rules for managing risk.  Rather, a variety of rules exist simultaneously.  Urban shopper can use a variety of strategies to negotiate satisfying exchanges based on their desire to maximize low cost, high quality, declining risk in future transactions, urban identity and personal status.  
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condor.depaul.edu:80/~rrotenbe/aeer/articles/-- Revised 2/11/96

Copyright © 1995  Robert Rotenberg