Five-Dollar Tea and Fair Prices: How Fosetter Thinks About Value

Spend a day at Fosetter and you hear Carmen talk about value a lot. She means something particular by it. During our October 2026 filming in the shop, she explained it through the suppliers she buys from, the five-dollar herbal tea at the window, and the customers who keep coming back.

Buy properly, and never squeeze the supplier

The companies that supply her bird's nest see her as just a retail shop, and they find it remarkable that a shop like hers moves the volume it does. Her approach is simple. "If I'm going to do it, I do it," she says. "Sometimes taking one or two boxes is just pointless."

She buys more because of what it does for everyone around her. "So the whole cycle works a little better. The whole ecosystem works a little better. The suppliers can eat. We, the retailers in the middle, can eat. And the customers get good quality."

That is why she does not push suppliers on price. "We respect our suppliers very much. We don't press down their prices. So when they come to our shop, what they give us is good goods." She says she has never done it. If a supplier wants to bring the price down, they do it on their own, and it comes down to their conscience. Then the circle turns. "Our goods are good, we get more customers, they earn more themselves, and they sell us more wholesale."

The five-dollar tea

At the tea window, the clear-throat herbal tea sells for five dollars. It is made with Xinhui chenpi, the aged tangerine peel she sells inside, which you can read about in our chenpi guide. "Don't look at our tea selling for only five dollars," she says. "Our ingredients already cost more than the price itself, because this peel is really expensive."

She has her own definition of value for money. "For some people, value for money means paying little for poor goods and feeling it's a great deal. With us, you pay a very reasonable price for goods of very high quality. So the value at our shop is different."

New staff do not start at that window right away. They first learn how to talk with all kinds of customers, and they write things down in a notebook. Only on the fifth day do they start selling tea and speaking to customers themselves, with Carmen watching and explaining whenever something comes out wrong. "Whether a customer spends five dollars or four," she says, "they hope that in the one minute they talk with you, they get what they need. Even if it's just one minute."

Five dollars as a beginning

In her mind, that cup is a start. "Five dollars is the beginning of fifty," she says. A good five-dollar experience turns into a customer who comes back for ginseng, and who tells other people the goods here are good and the service is good. When those customers pay a little more than they might elsewhere, she says, "what they buy is confidence. Their support for me. And the certainty that what they have in their hands is good."

Deals made that way last, she says. A sale should be the start of a relationship, never a one-off. Her customers now come from other provinces and from the United States. It also means that when a big order arrives, nobody panics. She showed us the largest order since the shop opened, a little over nine thousand dollars. "We weren't flustered at all," she says. "If you get to buy our goods, that's your good luck."

Why she holds the line

"Good is good," she says. "I'd be afraid of customers coming to hit me." The shop has been open for more than ten years. "The cost of a mistake for us is very high. Our name is right there." You can find that name above the door at 78 Rue De La Gauchetière Ouest, or read more about the shop on our About us page.