Machines Don't Always Speak Our Language

I drove by this store on Denny Way for about a year and wondered what it was. It's a weird looking place. On the outside it had a sign carrying its name, ZYK Enterprises, another sign promoting the 2008 Olympics and all over everything a bunch of writing in what appeared to be Cyrillic script.

Yesterday, I finally went in.

On the inside are stacks and stacks of home appliances and electronic gear, almost all of which the normal Seattle resident would be crazy to buy. Almost none of the stuff in the store would work properly in the United States.

Zeeshan Qazi, the owner, has found maybe the weirdest niche in the global economy. He buys and imports from all over the world home appliances that he sells to people who then ship them back to the country they - and sometimes the appliances - came from.

Zeeshan is garrulous in a natural, entrepreneurial way, ready to haggle price in Urdu, English or Russian. He has the look of a man who lives alone and is hastily assembled before leaving the house each morning.

Yesterday he wore a striped brown shirt that clashed only slightly with his striped brown pants. His dark hair is short and combed unfussily straight ahead, which pretty much describes his manner. With very little prompting, he explained his business, his customers, and how much he expects to sell this year - about $5 million worth of stuff, which will be 100 times as much as he sold in his first year in business a decade ago.

He was then working as a hospital assistant at Harborview. A friend back home in Pakistan sent him a videotape of the friend's wedding. Zeeshan was distressed when he realized the tape wouldn't play on his VCR.

He found a shop that would transfer the tape to one he could play. But it cost a dollar a minute for the three-hour tape. There has to be a better way, he thought. He made a note of the kind of machine the man used, found out it was made in Europe, tracked down the company and bought one. He set up shop in 700 square feet of Lake City Way basement.

He charged one-fifth the rate of what he had paid and soon built up a base of customers, some of whom started asking him if he knew how they could get their own machines. Or televisions to translate foreign broadcast signals.

Pretty soon, Zeeshan was importing VCRs and stereos, then vacuum cleaners and refrigerators and irons and power tools, all of them made for foreign markets. A Moulinex iron, for example, made in Mexico, intended for the European market. A seemingly identical one made in China by an American company intended for sale in Latin America. Yet another made in Japan for domestic consumption.

ZYK (named for Zeeshan's brother) exists because of the incompatibility of the world's technological infrastructure and the tremendous mobility in its economy. Zeeshan's customer mix changes with world fortunes. For a while, he sold a lot to Ethiopians, but when the civil war there ended, stability set in, some of it in the form of exorbitant import duties, squashing the market for Italian gelati machines in Addis Ababa.

Zeeshan estimates 40 percent of his customers are Russian, many of them crew members on ships that call here. They fax in orders before arrival. One waiting yesterday filled a whole pallet.

Zeeshan gladly sends a van to pick up customers and takes them wherever they want to go in town, even if that is shopping at Costco or Sam's Club.

"Sure, free service," he says. "They have no other way to get around."

In between explaining his business, Zeeshan worked with a customer who was in town to pick up a few things, including a new Boeing 737.

The man knew exactly what he wanted - an Hitachi Multi-System TV - but he took an hour to buy it, arguing merrily all the while.

"Everybody bargains," Zeeshan said. "But he will buy. Definitely. He has to ask a million questions, just to be sure."

This is different, he said, than, say, a Russian, who will walk in, find the thing he is looking for, stare at it in silence for an hour, then buy it.

Sure enough, the 737 man eventually bought the television, stripped $100 bills off a roll to pay for it and loaded it into the trunk of his car en route to Beijing.

Ka-ching! The weird wheel of the world economy has turned again. Terry McDermott's column appears Tuesday and Thursday. His phone message number is 515-5055. His e-mail address is: tmcd-new@seatimes.com