Vol. 1 - Ch. 7 - Business is good!

The three of them waited for another quarter of an hour. Workers came to the factory from their homes one after another to eat breakfast and go to work. Shi Lei then finally arrived. His hair was disheveled and his face was filled with the smell of alcohol. His walk was pretty unsteady. He greeted Shu Ping with a flat smile, "Director, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I slept late last night and forgot the time..."

This was the first time Shu Ping spoke to Shi Lei face to face. Before when the whole factory held a meeting, she only roughly memorized people’s faces. It must be said that birds of a feather indeed flocked together. She even suspected that Shi Lei played a role in what Jiang Hai did. The two people's social circles overlapped.

Shu Ping was too lazy to say more. It was not her style to waste time on useless things. She pointed to the things on the ground and said, "No need to explain. Just help carry the things to the car so we can leave quickly."

Shi Lei was ready to be scolded on the way here. He did not dare to underestimate the new director who could send people to prison. He didn’t expect that she would be so gentle.

There was an old saying in the village that a barking dog did not bite. Shi Lei had a hunch that he would lose this job sooner or later, but he didn’t show it on his face. He followed Shu Ping's instructions and started moving things while secretly calculating in his heart.

Shu Ping didn’t prepare too much for the first time. She only packed each product into cartons according to their categories, one box for each product, and also had tables and chairs for display, a pallet scale for weighing sugar, and a locked wooden box for change.

Everything was moved into the truck after two to three trips. The driver's cab was the only one with two seats. Shi Lei opened the co-pilot door and cheerfully asked Shu Ping to get in first. She shook her head and declined, giving the front seat to Ye Wei while she and Li Yueling went to the back compartment to check the goods.

Now Shi Lei was even more certain that the new factory director looked down on him. Originally, he had been worried for a while after Jiang Hai was caught, fearing that the things he had done for Jiang Hai would be exposed and that he would be implicated. It was his brothers in the underworld who advised him to relax. The Shu family sued Jiang Hai just for the money. As long as Jiang Hai spat out the money he had embezzled, the Shu family's goal would be achieved. The police station was not opened by the Shu family, and it wasn’t that easy to sue someone. After all, wasn't Chen Yibin so good at showing off in front of Shu Ping?

Unexpectedly, he had only been at ease for a few days when he started to suffer setbacks. Unless it was absolutely necessary, he didn't want to leave the food factory at all. Where could he find such an easy job where he could steal from time to time?

Every delivery would more or less have damaged goods. According to the factory's disposal procedures, if the merchant refused to accept a product due to serious damage, such as sugar spilled on the ground or peach cakes piled up and broken into crumbs, the deliveryman could directly destroy it or, if it was minor, it would be returned to the workshop for reprocessing.

Shi Lei colluded with the merchants and used the loss ratio within the regulations to get repurchases. Sometimes he reported losses even when there were no losses. He also had accomplices in the workshops who falsely put goods into the warehouse. Over time, he could make a lot of money in a year.

Shu Ping has not noticed this problem yet. Gu Zhihong's accounts were too rough, and the losses were controlled within a stable value. She would not easily think that Shi Lei had been tampering with it for a while now. It was just that he didn’t dare to be presumptuous back when Shu Hemin was alive. When Jiang Hai became the acting factory director, he no longer had any scruples.

The road where the market was located wasn’t far from the food factory. It only took about ten minutes to drive there. At this time, the slightly better positions had indeed been occupied by people. Shu Ping had two choices: one was to put their stall directly at the entrance, and the other was to put it in the back half. The two positions were equally good, but each had its advantages and disadvantages.

People who went to the market usually didn't buy things as soon as they came in case they couldn't carry the things they wanted to buy later. In other cases, people would have already bought everything they should buy in the first half and would be too lazy to walk to the back, so the middle position was the best.

Shu Ping thought about it for a while and decided to set up at the entrance. She was betting that even if people didn't buy anything when they came in, they would buy something when they came out. If they set up in the second half, the customer flow would naturally be reduced by half. Many people would buy everything they needed halfway through and just go home directly.

Li Yueling and Ye Wei were quick in their work. After Shu Ping decided on the spot, they moved the tables and chairs down and set them up. They didn't let Shu Ping move them but only asked her to keep an eye on the wooden box for change.

In Li Yueling's words, "Director, you look so gentle and delicate that you don't look like someone who does heavy work. I'm not like you, I’m big and strong. People who don't know me would think that all the delicious food at home has gone into my stomach."

Li Yueling wasn’t very fat, but she was tall and had a big frame. She looked strong with some flesh on her body. In the countryside, her body shape and personality were very popular. It was said that when she was a girl, those who rushed to match her almost got into a fight.

Shu Ping took out some of the products from each box and placed them on the table as samples. She also wrote the prices on cardboard and turned on the pre-recorded speakers to play their advertisements in a loop. The Fengxiang dialect was fully present in the strong and loud male voice through the three-dimensional surround sound.

"Good news, good news. Hongyun Food Factory has started a clearance sale. White sugar is 1.5 yuan per pound, brown sugar is 2.3 yuan per pound, peach cakes and biscuits are sold at a low price, and fruit candies of various flavors are free to try. If they don't taste good, don't buy them. If they don't taste good, you don't have to pay. It's better to buy them for your family. You can give them to relatives and friends. You can't leave without buying two pounds."

The lyrics were written by Shu Ping and the words were recorded by Shu Weimin. At first, he felt very embarrassed reading them. He wanted to stop recording several times but he was suppressed by her aunt.

The original words of his aunt were, "You old guy, you say you want to help your niece by doing this and that, but you’re always reluctant to record a few words. What else can I expect from you?"

After that, Shu Ping gave her a thumbs up.

The result of the magic sound piercing the people’s ears was that everyone who passed by would look over, but as Shu Ping guessed, most of the people just walked in while only a few stopped to ask or buy.

After ten minutes or so, Li Yueling was the first to lose her patience and started to get anxious. "Why is nobody buying when our prices are so low? Don't the people in town need food? It would be good to buy some white and brown sugar to cook."

Ye Wei was also anxious, but he saw that the factory director was calm and composed which made him feel very confident. Sure enough, not long after, the first wave of villagers who had returned from the market heard the hawking from the loudspeaker and gathered around in twos and threes.

"Is this brown sugar 2.3 yuan a bag?"

Shu Ping just nodded and was about to reply, when Li Yueling hurriedly said, "Yes, it's packed in one pound. Auntie, buy a bag. We get the goods directly from the food factory, and the quality is very good."

The other party didn't say whether he’d buy or not and just glanced at the table. His eyes lit up when he saw the peach cake.

"Hey, this peach cake is eight yuan a bag when I buy it in the store, but you only charge six yuan here? The packaging is the same."

"Yes, it’s made by Hongyuan Food Factory. I'll give you a piece to try. It's guaranteed to be the same as the one sold in the store."

Shu Ping was watching Li Yueling greet the customers from the side and was a little surprised. She originally brought them here because they were from the warehouse, but she didn't expect that she was a hidden sales talent. She made the customers trust her with just a few words. Maybe they thought the peach cake was good after eating it, so they opened up their business and made their first pot of gold by setting up a stall.

"One pound of brown sugar, one pound of peach cake, and one pound of fruit candy, a total of fourteen yuan and thirty cents." Li Yueling winked at Shu Ping while calculating the bill, leaned over, and whispered, "Director, this is our first customer, how about we give her the thirty cents change to add as a lucky charm?"

The boss was there, but the employees wanted to make their own decisions. If they met a petty person, they would definitely not accept such behavior, but Shu Ping's ego was obviously not that big. The food factory didn’t have a sales department, but Li Yueling had spontaneously become a salesperson when she started to receive customers.

Attracting customers, selling products, and fighting for the rights of the customers, this kind of fighting didn’t mean that she stood in opposition to the factory. For the food factory, the biggest benefit was to sell its products and get enough profit.

Even if the thirty cents were not reduced, won’t the customers bargain? Even so, there was a very big difference between them making the decision and the customers making the request themselves.

Shu Ping smiled and nodded, and said jokingly in a not-so-small voice, "Okay, you made this deal, so I'll give you a favor. But we're cheaper than what we sell outside anyway, so there's not much to make. If we lose money in the end, we'll deduct it from your salary."

Li Yueling was a little panicked when she heard the last sentence, but she quickly came to her senses when she saw the factory manager's smiling face. She admired her so much.

What the factory manager meant was that it was okay to round off the prices, but not too much. Setting up a stall was not for losing money.

So she pretended to be embarrassed, smiled at the customer, and handed the packed items to the other party, "Thirteen yuan, our boss generously gives you a discount of thirty cents. We'll come every fifteenth of the month from now on. Auntie, please patronize our business more often."

The customer heard their conversation a while ago. They were used to buying these items and knew that they were indeed 30% cheaper than in the store. She also took the initiative to round off the price. The customer was not the kind of person who was hard to satisfy and paid very happily.

Once there was one, there would be two. Some people who were originally just watching the fun, seeing the cheap prices, actively bought with the mentality of "If I don't take advantage of a bargain, I’m an idiot", and soon many people were standing in front of the stall.

Some people knew what they wanted to buy and bought it directly. Some people couldn't make up their minds and thought this or that was good, so they tried each one before deciding. In the end, some people bought some and some didn't. Shu Ping and the others didn't care. They were so busy filling their pockets and counting money that they didn't have time to do it.

In Fuxing Village next to Fengxiang Village, Shen Li, who had just returned from the market, sent the things she bought back to her mother's house and then took two bags of peach cakes and a bag of fruit candies to visit her sick aunt. When she entered the courtyard, she saw her cousin Huo Feng sitting by the well washing the quilt. Knowing that her aunt had soiled the quilt again, she sighed silently.

Shen Li's father and Huo Feng's father were cousins. As for why the two brothers have different surnames, we’d have to start from the generation of their great-grandfather.

Their great-grandfather wasn’t a villager of Fuxing Village. His hometown was in trouble and he had no way to make a living. He fled here with his mother. At that time, a family surnamed Shen in the village had no son and was thinking about finding a son-in-law for their daughter. Their great-grandfather was good-looking and filial. He not only took his mother with him but he also would rather starve himself to let her eat. This filial piety was seen by the Shen family. They thought that although he was poor, he was worthy of trust, so they asked someone to act as a matchmaker and set up a marriage contract.

Their great-grandfather's mother had no objection to her son marrying into the Shen family. She had only one request, that one of her grandsons must be surnamed Huo to continue their family line. Otherwise, she would be ashamed to see the ancestors of the Huo family in the underworld.

In this way, starting from the grandfather's generation, a branch of the Huo family's bloodline was left behind. Although the two families belong to one family in terms of blood ties, the older generation had a deep obsession with passing on the family line. The ancestors of the Shen family favored children with the surname Shen when dividing the family property, and Huo Feng's grandfather got the least. This also led to Huo Feng's father getting married the last, and things didn't get better until Huo Feng joined the army. Unfortunately, Huo Feng’s father was unlucky and died in a car accident while selling grain in the city. Huo Feng's mother, Li Shumei, was too sad and her health deteriorated day by day. Huo Feng developed very well in the army and had the opportunity to continue to be promoted to company commander, but he retired early because there was no one to take care of Li Shumei. He was still unmarried at the age of 25.

It wasn’t that Huo Feng's personal conditions weren’t good. He was tall and handsome, but his age was awkward. People of the same age as him would have already gotten married, and those who were four to five years younger were more delicate and unwilling to take care of a paralyzed mother-in-law as soon as they got home. Moreover, Huo Feng had no proper job except for farming his own land. Young girls preferred boys who worked in offices. What was more, the Huo family still lived in an old tile-roofed house built thirty years ago while those in the village with better conditions had already built brick buildings.

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