Where the best place to go for office supplies? The kind of things I’m looking for are: computer desks and chairs, notepads, folders, binders, pens and pencils, etc.
Back home I’d to a place something like this:
officemax.com/ or a store dealing in used office equipment for the furniture.
Any tips would be good.
This is a good question. If there are any super-stores specific to office supplies, I’d like to know.
What I do now is shop at the large quasi-wharehouse stores:
The big disappointment with office supplies in Taiwan is associated with the big dissapointment with Taiwanese in general. They are cheap. You simply have a hard time buying sturdy, rugged, professional-looking office supplies. Also, I don’t want to give my foreign client a document folder with a knock-off “Hello Kitty” on it. I find myself spending a lot of time rummaging around in the office section of stores here, looking for something half-decent to stock my business with.
When I go back to the States, I go to a Staples, Office Depot or OfficeMax and bring back a big (I mean big) box of office supplies, from good ball point pens to stainless steel rulers to US-sized staples and staplers to writing pads (oh my, have you ever found a writing pad with just lines (no other crap like Hello Kittys or poems or boxes with unnecessary numbers and weird lines)).
I’ve found that many Taiwanese that use my office supplies from the States know the difference. Yes, I have to keep track of my ball point pens. One laoban said, “Wow, this is a good ball point pen! Where did you geet it?”
So this is the curse of Taiwan: YOU CAN’T PAY MONEY FOR QUALITY. YOU CAN’T EVEN PAY A HUGE PREMIUM FOR IT. People assume you want to be a cheapskate, so there isn’t even a market for it.
If there is, I’D LOVE to know about it.
Also, for where Taiwanese go to find second-hand furniture (including an abundance of new-like office furniture) is on Xia1 Men2 Street. You can turn on to it from Hoping West Road, just a few blocks away from Rossevelt Road. It is one of those roads with a ton of mom-and-pop vendors with everything from office furniture to household furniture to major appliances.
The RT Mart2 store in Neihu has a reasonable selection of stationary and office supplies. Some of it is quite good quality as well, i buy all my hard backed lever arch files etc from there. They also carry some of the local rubbish as well, so some sorting is required, but it aint to difficult.
Hope this helps