Chapter 6 Making Money: See the explanation if you have any questions.

Wang Xiao's wish came true. The old lady did indeed buy their braised dishes, and muttered, "I want to see what this dried tofu from the provincial capital tastes like."

Wang Xiao's hopes were dashed, because the old lady had no interest in chicken feet, and didn't even glance at them, instead asking for only one yuan's worth of braised tofu.

She wasn't disappointed. She picked up some food and, as requested, filled a bowl with the braising broth. "Hmm, good taste. This braising broth is delicious with noodles."

A great start! One order was placed, and the next one followed. After the two sisters had pushed their cart through half the village, almost half of the braised tofu in the stainless steel pot had already been consumed.

Chen Jingjing became anxious: "Why is no one asking for chicken feet? Chicken feet are delicious."

Wang Xiao comforted her, "It's okay, the adults haven't come back yet."

As they were talking, they bumped into their uncle and aunt, who were returning to the village from the fields. Aunt Guizhen, who had bought them some braised dried fruit the night before, grinned at them from afar: "I saw you two from over there! I was wondering why the braised dried fruit seller was here. What are you two doing here?"

The uncle and aunt were also completely baffled. They had left early in the morning and ate lunch in the fields, so they had no idea what the two girls were up to.

Wang Xiao grinned and opened the steel pot lid: "Yes, we braised it. It's the recipe from a century-old shop in the provincial capital, it's delicious."

Whether it tastes good or not, no one knows right now. But whether it smells good or not, anyone with a nose can smell it.

Goodness, it smells so good! Even several people with throats so dry they could practically smoke couldn't help but salivate.

Chen Jingjing subconsciously puffed out her chest proudly. This was nothing! When her sister first took it out of the pot, it smelled amazing. Now that it's cold, the aroma has faded by at least half.

Wang Xiao had already picked up a chicken foot and stuffed it to Aunt Guizhen's mouth: "Auntie, try it, it's delicious."

Aunt Guizhen wanted to refuse, but her hands were dirty and she dared not touch the college student cadre from the city. She could only open her mouth and be forced to eat a fragrant, spicy and fresh chicken foot.

Goodness, this meat is practically melting in your mouth; it slides right down your tongue. Delicious, so delicious!

The family harvesting rice today, seeing her expression, immediately smiled and offered, "Sure, then let's save some trouble tonight and add a dish. How much are these chicken feet?"

Uh, Wang Xiao really didn't know.

She lacked a thorough understanding of the prices in Zhouzhen in 1990. Chicken feet were priced similarly to tofu, so braised chicken feet and braised dried tofu should also be priced the same. However, the processing methods for the two were different, and the amount of dried goods per pound was different, so it didn't seem like that should be the case.

In the end, the farmers helped her set the price, the same as pork, at 2.3 yuan per jin.

It's not that everyone is driving up the price; it's just that the markup on braised dishes is inherently high. For example, braised chicken feet and salted goose sold in town cost three yuan per pound because most families don't know how to make them, and the technique itself is valuable.

Wang Xiao said that she had learned it.

She voluntarily rounded down the price: "Two yuan, two yuan a pound, that's fine. This is my first time selling something."

The uncle and aunt quickly chimed in, "Yes, yes, two yuan."

Although the couple found it strange that their college student niece was a street vendor, she didn't make a fuss about going back to the provincial capital to be a stepmother. Even if she wanted to demolish the house, the elders wouldn't say a word, let alone selling a small food stall.

The host was generous and gave five yuan to buy chicken feet.

However, since Wang Xiao hadn't prepared plastic bags, and the scale they were using wasn't an electronic scale but the kind with a beam, it was Uncle Hu Sheng, who had been a knife maker, who gave the final figure based on his sharp eye: a blue-flowered bowl filled to the brim would be worth two yuan's worth of chicken feet, and a large soup bowl filled to the brim would be worth five yuan's worth of chicken feet.

Without hesitation, Wang Xiao immediately agreed; this was a convenient approach.

To be honest, she's not very good at using a scale yet.

They stood by the roadside discussing for quite a while. This road was the only way for villagers to go down to the fields, and many people returning from the fields saw it and gathered around to watch the excitement.

Aunt Guizhen was particularly enthusiastic, acting as a human promoter, praising the braised chicken feet to the skies. Several other owners, urging those around them to join in, also reached into their wallets to buy chicken feet.

In the end, the braised chicken feet in this steel pot sold out completely.

No wonder, chicken feet weigh more than dried tofu, since there are fewer of them to begin with.

The two sisters didn't bother to listen to the instructions to play or eat. They quickly pushed their cart and ran to sell the braised tofu in the steel pot over the remaining half of the village, and then immediately ran home to get a second pot.

This time, the two of them went to the next village, but there was no readily available tap water. In the end, the braised tofu in the pot was sold out, but the braised chicken feet were hardly touched.

By the time the two returned home, the sky had already turned gray. The uncle and aunt, who had just returned from the fields and finished their work on their own plot of land, immediately greeted them, "Alright, alright, come and eat with us!"

Chen Jingjing is now gradually getting into the swing of things and has no appetite at all. She is only worried: "No, there's still a pot of braised dishes to go."

ah?

The parents were stunned. They rarely used the stove at home, except for special occasions like holidays or banquets. So when they got home and saw the empty iron pots outside, they assumed the braised dishes were all sold out.

Wang Xiao was also annoyed. It wasn't that the market was saturated, but that she was too slow. In more than two hours, she had only visited two villages. If she had been faster and visited four or five villages, the braised food would definitely have been sold out.

Chen Jingjing was extremely anxious: "There's a whole pot of it! If we don't sell it, we'll lose everything!"

"It's okay," Wang Xiao comforted her. "We've already broken even."

It wasn't just breaking even; she pulled out all the banknotes she had collected—one or two mao, one or two yuan, the largest denomination being five yuan, and the smallest five fen. Added together, wow, a full 19 yuan and 8 mao.

I know I bought tofu, chicken feet, and dried chili peppers (my uncle has star anise, sugar, soy sauce, and other seasonings readily available), which cost a total of 10 yuan. So far today, my gross profit from selling braised tofu and braised chicken feet is 9.8 yuan. There are still chicken feet left in the stainless steel pot, and another pot of braised dishes in the inner pot.

My uncle, the head of the supply and marketing department, only earns 37 yuan a month.

How terrifying, how lucrative!

The family of three was completely dumbfounded.

Only Wang Xiao remained unmoved; this was only the beginning.

She didn't wait until tomorrow to sell the remaining braised dishes. After all, braised tofu could be reheated, but braised chicken feet would become too mushy if cooked again because the collagen had already seeped into the broth. The flavor would actually be diminished.

Besides, it's only a few hours already. Why not keep making money? Why waste your life just staying home watching TV? As a startup founder, I'd rather kill her. She gets anxious if she doesn't make money for even a minute.

So she ate dinner with her uncle and his family and then decided to go to town to sell braised chicken feet.

Because villagers don't have the habit of eating late-night snacks, but they do in town.

How could Zhouzhen, a town with twenty or thirty factories, not have a night market? The night market stalls were quite lively. There were vendors selling wontons, braised pork noodles, and even roasted pears with rock sugar and roasted chestnuts. You could smell the sweet aroma from afar, and it had a really cool vibe.

She took the coal stove, which had been extinguished but was still warm, and the stainless steel pot to town, and together with her aunt and cousin, sold out the entire pot of braised chicken feet.

Seriously, young people who eat late-night snacks during work hours are really willing to spend money; they want to try everything new and exciting.

Many people who were already eating noodles were drawn by the aroma of the braised dishes and wanted to try a chicken foot. As a result, quite a few people came back to buy more after finishing their noodles. This time, it was fortunate that my aunt had bought plastic bags from the shop, otherwise the stall owners selling late-night snacks wouldn't have had enough bowls to borrow.

When the uncle finished drinking and returned home to pick up the three of them from the street, he was startled to see his wife staring blankly into the door: "What's wrong? Who's been up to something?"

He didn't go to the street to sell braised food because in rural areas, banquets always involve drinking at night. If he left the table early unless he had something extremely urgent to do, it would be disrespectful to the host.

"It's nothing." Wang Xiao was the calmest. After all, she was a person with tens of millions in assets who had transmigrated from a book, and she wouldn't lose her composure over twenty-odd yuan.

But her aunt grabbed her husband's arm, her voice trembling: "Yi Dong, 29 yuan is more than my monthly salary."

She works in a garment factory, and unless business is exceptionally good and she has to work overtime non-stop, she earns just over twenty yuan a month.

Her husband was better off than her; at least he was the head of the supply and marketing department at a chemical plant, earning 37 yuan a month.

Now, her niece earns more than a month's salary in a single day.

There's also a large stainless steel pot of braised tofu; earning another eight or nine yuan is definitely not a problem, which is more than enough to match her husband's monthly income.

"So much money?" Chen Yidong was also taken aback. He knew that as long as you did business right, you could make money, but he didn't expect it to be this profitable. It wasn't anything special. It was just braised tofu and braised chicken feet, right?

Yes, it was really delicious. At the end, while they were drinking, they even used the soup to make noodles to fill their stomachs.

"Making money, definitely making money!" Qian Xuemei emphasized, "Look at the guy who sells braised tofu, he makes tofu and sells braised tofu, plus some spiced tofu and stinky tofu, and he still built a three-story house for his son. I went to Jiaozuo (township) for a banquet last time and saw it. It's such a bright and spacious house. I heard he doesn't have any debts."

The couple had saved up for almost ten years to build their two-and-a-half-story house, and they still had nearly a thousand yuan in debt that they could only pay off after receiving their year-end bonuses.

Chen Jingjing also came to her senses. She was more than qualified to say whether selling braised food was profitable or not. She couldn't help but feel annoyed: "Sister, we should have bought more braised chicken feet. Really, otherwise we could have sold at least half a pot more tonight."

When they left, several people came over to ask, expressing their regret that they couldn't buy any more.

Wang Xiao laughed it off: "I bought them all this morning, there aren't many chicken feet available at the market."

Even if she had more, she still couldn't afford it. Because the 10 yuan in her pocket today was all the belongings left to her by the original owner.

Logically speaking, the original owner, a college graduate, wouldn't have started working until July, and her minimum internship salary was only 64 yuan a month. She ate and lived at home, didn't pay a single penny for living expenses, and had already received her salary for over three months. She should have been able to save at least a hundred or two hundred yuan.

But she didn't follow the usual path; she went out of her way to find a divorced man to be her stepmother, and she was incredibly sincere and devoted. Before her parents had even received a single act of filial piety from her, her future mother-in-law and stepdaughter were already being provided with everything they needed. Oh, and when they ran out of money, she even asked her mother for pocket money to help her parents support her future in-laws.

This is what Wang Xiao despises most about people who are obsessed with love. Fine, you can ruin yourself, but why waste your own money? Did you even earn it? You have no self-awareness whatsoever.

Forget it, what's done is done. It wasn't her fault, so why is she lamenting? It's just a couple hundred yuan, no big deal, she can earn it back later.

Qian Xuemei was also annoyed: "If we had just taken the braised tofu over there to sell together, we should have been able to sell it too."

But it's already nine o'clock, and there's not much of a proper nightlife in the countryside. The town's night market is probably about to close up.

"No rush." ​​Wang Xiao was quite calm. "Tomorrow at noon, Jingjing and I will push the carts to Lijia Village and Yangliu Village to sell them. We can sell them. People need to eat lunch too."

Qian Xuemei couldn't help but offer some advice: "Why don't you two walk towards the edge of the field? Some people who don't have time to go home for dinner after harvesting rice might want to have a treat."

Seriously, in October, the sweat pouring down your body in the fields could freeze into salt crystals. Dishes with lots of oil and strong flavors are very popular; there's bound to be buyers.

Wang Xiao laughed: "Okay, Aunt, we'll listen to you."

Haha, anyone who has ever made money knows how sweet it is to earn money.

Look, her new sales team has already cultivated two core members.

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Wang Xiao, whose only concern is money: Emotional manipulation is fine. Money manipulation? I'll beat you to a pulp!

A rambling digression.

Because Jinjiang's comments are displayed in a sequential order, I only noticed so many questions about Chapter Six, so I'll answer them all here.

First of all, Zhou Town is based on my hometown, and that's where prices were back then. A Jin asked many elders and confirmed that it was indeed at that level.

If you ask me to post price data for the real-life Zhouzhen, I really can't find it.

For a long time, rural towns were neglected, and the data were mostly oral histories. Even the statistics on workers' wages at that time were based on urban workers' wages and state-owned factory wages.

Township and village enterprises were then called "community-run factories," and their wages were much lower than those of state-owned factories. Due to the household registration system at the time (you've heard of the term "agricultural to non-agricultural conversion," right? In the TV series "All Is Well," Su Mingyu's mother married her father only to get an urban household registration), the difference between urban and rural household registration was significant, leading to a large income gap. Farmers readily accepted wages of twenty or thirty yuan, because compared to the uncertainty of leaving their homes to become migrant workers in big cities, facing detention and the possibility of not finding work, this kind of work near home, where they could take care of the fields, their elderly parents, and their children, better suited their needs. (In fact, many farmers today also earn very low wages working near their homes.)

Compared to most farmers at the time, the people of Zhouzhen were already very fortunate.

Beginning in the first half of 1989, the central government implemented various rectification and reform measures, halting many planned projects to cool down investment and alleviate the rapid rise in raw material prices. However, the cancellation of projects meant that migrant workers who had come to the cities for these projects were left without work and needed to be sent back to their hometowns. This resulted in a massive exodus of 5 million migrant workers returning to their hometowns. Subsequently, the central government issued documents to strictly control the indiscriminate influx of migrant workers into the cities.

As for food prices, according to the "Tianjin Price Records", in 1990, you could buy a pound of pork for 2.3 yuan and a pound of mutton for 2.98 yuan.

The price of braised food isn't listed in the price catalog, but considering the current price of a pound of salted duck and a pound of pork, it's normal that it's more expensive than pork. It wasn't cheap back then.

Contrary to popular belief, meat prices in rural areas weren't cheaper than in cities back then. This was because farmers typically only slaughtered their pigs around the Lunar New Year, unless they were large-scale professional pig farmers. The meat consumed in rural areas was usually supplied by meat processing plants or vendors, and due to transportation costs, it might actually be more expensive.

People might think that wages weren't that low in 1990, after all, it was the 1990s. In the 1980s, a monthly income of tens of yuan was normal, but in the 1990s it should have been several hundred yuan.

However, 1990 was a special case. After the failure of the price reform in 1988, the reform entered a period of setbacks in 1989. Before Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour in 1992, the national policy was to seek stability. At that time, there was a de facto economic recession. Wages had not increased for several years, many units could only pay partial wages, and many factories had stopped production or suspended operations.

If we interpret the 1990 salary as the salary of the 1980s, would that make it acceptable?

Interestingly, prices overheated in 1988, and then stabilized for the next few years. During this period, everything except wages was rising.

One of the main reasons why township enterprises, represented by Zhouzhen mentioned in the article, were so popular at the time was that they were small in scale, relatively flexible in operation, and had little pressure from triangular debt.

In addition, they have low land costs, do not bear the responsibility for employees' medical care, children's education, housing, etc., and have low worker wages, low factory labor costs, and low production costs, giving them an advantage in pricing.

Later, the policy changed, and a large number of township enterprises went bankrupt, forcing the people of Zhouzhen to migrate to the city for work.

As for the story about the female protagonist selling braised dried tofu mentioned in the article.

In 1990, information was extremely limited, and rural areas were still in a typical rural society. Much information was passed down orally. Many food preparation methods that seem very simple to us now and can be easily found online were simply untaught back then. Those who knew them kept them very secret and wouldn't share them with outsiders.

So when Grandpa Lugan wasn't selling his braised tofu, everyone else had to wait.

As for the argument that braised tofu won't taste good if the seasonings aren't complete, Grandpa Braised Tofu made braised tofu that suited the tastes of the people of Zhouzhen using simple seasonings (the female lead thought it was just so-so).

He made vegetarian braised dishes, while Wang Xiao made meat-based braised dishes. It was normal for her products to be popular in rural areas at that time, as people preferred oily and flavorful foods.

With such low wages, why are people still willing to spend money on food and drinks?

Because people don't face immense pressure from housing, education, or similar issues, they tend to live for the moment. Young people, in particular, often spend their earnings as soon as they earn them, and it's common to see them living paycheck to paycheck.

In addition, the busy farming season is when rural people are most willing to spend money, so it's not surprising that they are generous in buying braised food.

It's perfectly normal for a female protagonist who transmigrated into a book not to know to bring a pot to store the tofu; she assumed the seller would provide the container. She herself admitted that before transmigrating, she made only a small amount of homemade braised tofu, so she didn't immediately realize that selling more would require more tofu and that plastic bags wouldn't be suitable.

It's not surprising that the female protagonist, being new to selling braised chicken feet, didn't know the price and let the locals set it. Rural areas are traditional societies where farmers clearly distinguished between insiders and outsiders. If you tried to cheat someone selling food by setting a price arbitrarily, you'd be looked down upon by those around you. Besides, the female protagonist wasn't stupid; if someone were to blatantly try to cheat her, she wouldn't sell at a loss.

Furthermore, the image of a somewhat naive seller aligns better with her persona as a college graduate cadre from the provincial capital. This makes people more convinced that she only decided to sell food in Zhouzhen on a whim.

Farmers are more likely to trust such people, believing they won't cheat and that the goods and prices they sell are honest.

Of course, the misunderstanding is my fault. A Jin researches a lot when writing, but often the information is considered too real and is considered sensitive, so it gets locked as soon as it's posted (many long-time readers who have followed A Jin's works should know this), so I'm not very willing to post information.

As Ah Jin writes a lot of historical fiction, he often overlooks the existence of information cocoons. I thought that some things were already known to everyone and didn't need to be explained.

I will be more careful in the future.