The power of the broom

To understand what starting a business in Vietnam can offer you, you just need to open a small coffee shop on the street.

I've witnessed countless tragicomic situations that can unfold around a minimalist business with just a few employees, simply by wandering around the sidewalks and intersections of Ba Trieu Street near my office.

Illustration photo: Zing.

One day, you'll find the sidewalk in front of your shop has been dug up to install something. The digging is done quickly, but the rate at which they fill it back in is... up to their discretion. I've witnessed such bargaining: a representative of the group of workers goes around "negotiating" prices with each street-side business. Two million dong per shop, double that for larger stores, and the sidewalk will be filled in immediately. Of course, many people shrug it off, because the losses from a few days of business already exceed that amount.

If you want to work by principles, many people will surely remember a business in Ho Chi Minh City that stubbornly insisted on knowing the progress of excavation and backfilling right in front of their house. The case eventually ended up in… court. Not many people have that much patience.

Does digging up the road only bother you once? Then there's the sanitation worker. Every day, she can show up in front of your shop at peak hours, carrying a broom and sweeping up the dust that fills the air. The shop owner will grin wryly, "Excuse me, ma'am," and sneakily "stop" her with a banknote in their hand. If the shop owner forgets in any given month, the broom will remind them.

Anyone can come and "manipulate" a business in some way. The image of the broom sweeping dust is now commonplace; I don't know how widespread it is, but I've seen it more than once, and it's truly haunting. Because if a broom can become a tool to threaten business people – to drive them to ruin if one so chooses – then there's no tool that can't do that.

I held my press card, and friends and relatives, thinking I had some sense of logic, were constantly pushed forward to deal with "the parties" in these kind of... broom-wielding visits.

The general feeling is one of deadlock. Right or wrong no longer matters in such visits. Because in business, time is money. To prove they are right, business owners lose countless hours and effort; especially when they are deliberately obstructed.

I've seen the same spirit displayed by the cleaning lady and the road construction worker at many levels and in many sectors. With that spirit, proactively compromising with a crumpled envelope in the palm of your hand is the most beneficial for the business.

In the World Bank's "Start a Business" ranking, Vietnam only ranked 119th out of 189 countries assessed. Interestingly, in the Global Entrepreneurship Index 2015/2016 by the Global Association of Business Researchers (GEM), there is an index called "Fear of Failure" when starting a business, and Vietnam ranked 8th out of 60 countries.

"The fear of failure" among Vietnamese entrepreneurs. Photo: Internet.

Of course, this could be a cultural factor, stemming from the Vietnamese people's safety habits. But it could also be due to objective reasons. When people are forced to fear a broom sweeping the street, they can fear anything. The biggest problem with stories like "the broom" or "the digging up of the road" is that it's very difficult to create institutions to prevent them, when people actively use their power to create obstacles. Meanwhile, the process of working together "according to principles" encounters an administrative system that, just thinking about it, makes business owners want to bribe them illegally.

The administrative system itself is a broom ready to sweep away businesses at any time if the person wielding it so desires. Is the only solution really just to urge people to be more considerate of one another?

According to VNE