EvidenceField
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Among street and market vendors in Ho Chi Minh City, which would genuinely move day-to-day takings onto QR — versus politely agree in an interview but keep running on cash — and what actually moves the ones who won't?

You askedWill street vendors in Ho Chi Minh City actually adopt QR payments, or are they just saying yes to be polite?

The decision this informs

Whether to commit six months of engineering to a vendor-facing QR merchant app, and which vendor segment to build the first version for.

$1,500 design · $5.6–7.4k execution est.24-day timeline

View findings

How we'll answer it

In-person fieldworkThe question is a courtesy-bias trap: ask a Ho Chi Minh City vendor "would you use QR?" in a survey or of an AI panel and you collect polite yeses that don't predict behavior — acquiescence bias runs strongest in exactly this kind of informal, relationship-first market, and vendor cash habits are far from the populations LLMs represent well.

Separating a courtesy yes from real intent means sitting at the stall, in Vietnamese, watching what vendors do with cash. AI does the ops: recruiting logistics, transcription, translation, synthesis.

Synthetic can

  • Pre-screen the discussion guide for leading questions that only invite a polite yes
  • Generate hypotheses to test (not evidence) about likely adoption barriers

Synthetic can't here

  • Stand in for Ho Chi Minh City vendor cash habits, trust, or economics
  • Estimate real QR adoption quantitatively in this market

Routing limits follow published research — including independent evaluations (NN/g 2026) that reached the same boundaries.

14 stall-side interviews with observation — vendors talk through their last several transactions while the moderator watches how payment is actually handled; 40–60 min, Vietnamese, local moderator, across three districts and two market types.

Who we'll talk to

Street and wet-market vendors in Ho Chi Minh City who currently take mostly cash

14in-depth interviews
Ho Chi Minh City, VietnamMarket

Recruited across District 1 (tourist-facing carts and cafés), Bình Thạnh (a residential wet market), and District 5 / Chợ Lớn (older trading stalls); mix of archetypes from young mobile-food sellers to twenty-year wet-market stallholders.

Timeline & cost

24Days
$1,500Design fee — fixed
$5,600–$7,400Execution estimate — preliminary

Assumptions this estimate stands on

  • Participant incentive ₫250k per session
  • Local moderator + field recruiter day rates
  • Incidence: roughly 1 in 3 approached vendors qualifies and consents; range covers re-recruit if show-rate < 70%

What you'll get

  • Decision memo: the answer, confidence, recommended action
  • Finding-by-finding evidence trail (every claim cited to transcripts)
  • 14 translated, searchable transcripts in your evidence field
$1,500 design · $5.6–7.4k execution est.
DeliveredView findings