Everyone present agreed that this made sense; if it was a matter of losing money, there was no reason to compensate at the original price. Since it was the original price, the clothes should be returned to the owner.

Seeing the gazes of the crowd, the man didn't want to argue any further. After all, the clothes were made by his mother using fabric he had bought, and the fabric only cost one and a half ounces. Now that he had received two ounces, it was enough to buy a brand new garment. He had been wearing the clothes for so long for nothing, so it wasn't a loss. He agreed.

That evening, after the shop closed, everyone gathered for a meeting. Cui Ying kept her head down, not daring to speak. Meng Zhao coughed lightly, breaking the silence first.

"I've already figured out how to wash the red oil off the clothes, and I've also taken the old clothes to the tailor shop to sell. I got a total of six hundred coins. You can all share your thoughts on what happened today."

Shen Yun spoke first, “I also bear some responsibility for this. I was mainly in charge of the earlier part. There were too many customers in the shop at the time, and Cui Ying saw that I was too busy, so she went to help serve the noodles. I didn’t expect such a mishap to happen.”

"Our shop doesn't have fixed responsibilities. When we have free time, we all do other work."

Aunt Feng'e then added, "I was also at fault. I didn't teach her properly. When adding powder to a customer's bowl, you should turn the bowl towards yourself, not towards the customer."

Meng Zhao turned his gaze to Cui Ying and asked softly, "Cui Ying, did Aunt Feng'e teach you about this?"

Cui Yinghong nodded with her eyes narrowed. "I taught you, but I forgot." After saying that, she hardened her heart and continued, "Manager, this is all my fault. Deduct the compensation from my wages."

Meng Zhao slowly shook his head and said earnestly, "Since I am the manager of this shop, I naturally won't make the employees pay for everything when something goes wrong. But you forgot the rules of the shop, so you can't go unpunished. 100 coins will be deducted from your wages this month."

He then continued, “I’ve gathered everyone here today not to assign blame, but to teach you a lesson from this incident. We were lucky today; that customer was just momentarily greedy. If someone had deliberately tried to extort money, it probably wouldn’t have been resolved with just a few taels of silver.”

“From now on, we will no longer pour powder for customers. We will just put the powder on the table and let customers pour it themselves. This will prevent word from getting out that we lost money today, which might attract those who really want to extort money.”

"But when you're serving the powder to customers, remember to remind them to be careful when pouring it."