Chen Zhe came to the company today. He couldn't keep hiding, after all, as the president, there were many things in the company that required his signature.
His current office is no longer in the North District, but in Hu Ling's former office in the East District.
He had barely sat down at the company when Yang Yun stormed in, carrying a stack of documents.
She slammed the file down on the table with a huff.
“These all require your signature. Look at you, you haven’t been here for so many days, how much work has piled up here? Do you have any sense of responsibility at all? Sister Hu trusted you so much before, entrusting the company to you, is this how you repay her?”
Chen Zhe ignored Yang Yun's angry words and looked through the documents.
"These are minor matters; you can handle them yourself."
Yang Yun snorted angrily upon hearing this.
"Minor matters? These are all related to the company's future development plans, and you consider them minor matters?"
"These things were already announced to everyone when Sister Hu was still here. You should have heard it during the meeting, right? Just do what Sister Hu set out beforehand. There's no need to go through me."
Upon hearing Chen Zhe's words, Yang Yun finally lost her temper. She placed her hands on the table and glared at Chen Zhe. "Although Sister Hu had formulated a development plan before, as the president, you are responsible for supervising the implementation of every task, instead of pushing all these things onto us. If we have to do everything, then what's the point of having you as the president?"
Chen Zhe leaned back slightly on the sofa, twirling a pen in his hand.
"You've got that backwards. If I, the president, have to do everything, what's the point of having you managers? Sister Hu has already explained these things clearly before. If I have to repeat myself, it's a complete waste of my time."
"Your time? Ha! What do you do with your time? You're never at the office. Are you out chasing girls or having fun?"
"Whether I'm going to pick up girls or have fun, that seems to be my business. Nothing major has happened at the company, so you can handle everything, right?"
Yang Yun's chest heaved with anger upon hearing Chen Zhe's words.
She pulled a stack of documents from the pile and threw it in front of Chen Zhe.
"I can't handle this, President Chen. This is your mess, clean it up yourself!"
Chen Zhe picked up the document and frowned slightly.
Seeing Chen Zhe frown, Yang Yun felt a sense of vengeful pleasure.
"Look at your Zhe Shang Zhe, you've been losing money for two consecutive months, and this month the losses have been even more severe. If this continues, well, you'll be forced to close down sooner or later."
The financial statement that Yang Yun showed Chen Zhe was from Zhe Shang Zhe. The situation was as she had described; Zhe Shang Zhe had indeed suffered losses, and the losses were substantial.
Chen Zhe picked up the documents and stood up.
I'm going out for a bit.
"Hehe, you should go now, don't act like nothing's wrong all day long."
...
Chen Zhe drove himself to Zhe Shangzhe. For the past month, Zhang Kai had been staying at Qingyun Mountain, and without a driver, he had to drive himself.
After parking his car in the open-air parking lot, he went into the supermarket.
The employees greeted him warmly along the way.
Chen Zhe nodded.
Seeing the bustling crowd in the supermarket, he couldn't understand why, with such good business, there would still be losses.
He questioned several employees in succession, not directly about the company's losses, but instead inquired about recent business.
The employees' answers were basically the same: they all said that business had been good recently, and even better in the last few days.
Their answers left Chen Zhe even more confused, so he went directly to Wang De's office.
He knocked on the door.
Wang De's voice came from inside.
"Come in!"
Chen Zhe pushed open the door and walked in. Wang De was stunned for a moment when he saw that it was Chen Zhe, and then immediately stood up.
"Brother, why didn't you tell me you were coming?"
Chen Zhe walked over with a grin and sat down next to him.
"Isn't this a surprise for you? Bro, you look thinner than I've seen you in a month!"
"Haha, really? I think it's alright."
Wang De disagreed.
Chen Zhe saw that there was nothing wrong with his expression, which made him even more puzzled.
"Brother, has anything been going on at the supermarket lately?"
"Something happened? No, why would you ask that?"
Chen Zhe hesitated for a moment, then took out the financial statement from his bag and placed it in front of Wang De.
Wang De paused for a moment after seeing the financial statements, then sighed.
"You came to see me because of this, right?"
Chen Zhe nodded.
"Brother, can you tell me what happened?"
Wang De took a cigarette out of the pack and handed it to Chen Zhe, who took it.
Wang De lit one for himself as well.
“I don’t know either. I noticed this when I checked the accounts last month. Our business was doing very well, but for some reason, the calculations showed a loss. At first, I thought it was a cost issue, so I made another round of adjustments to the product prices. I thought everything would be fine, but this month, the losses are even more severe than last month.”
"This doesn't make sense. Can't they even find the data?"
“I was wondering too. I wanted to tell you, but Sister Hu hasn’t been doing well lately… so I didn’t dare bring it up. I was afraid it would upset you, so I thought I’d handle it myself first. But I didn’t expect you to ask me about it.”
Hearing him say that, Chen Zhe took a drag of his cigarette.
"Call in a few accountants to check the accounts."
"OK!"
...
A few moments later, several accountants walked into the office, and they spent an hour going over the accounts.
Following Chen Zhe's instructions, several areas with relatively high expenses were selected.
The majority of the cost came from purchasing goods.
Secondly, there were the employee benefits, because Hu Ling later helped them increase them significantly.
One is purchasing goods, and the other is wages and benefits; these two major expenses take up a lot of money.
Chen Zhe looked through it and finally saw something wrong.
“We seem to have stocked up on a lot of home appliances lately, but the ones we've sold are all relatively cheap. Look here, we've stocked up on 5 million yuan worth of goods, but in reality, most of the things we've sold are quite inexpensive. These big-ticket items just don't sell.”
Wang De saw that this was indeed the case.
"Huh, that's really true. No wonder there have been fewer delivery trucks lately."
“If we bring in expensive items but they don’t sell, we will naturally incur losses. It may seem like our supermarket has a lot of foot traffic, but in reality, people are mostly buying small products.”
"Brother, you have sharper eyes. How come I didn't see that before?"
"It might be an illusion caused by the apparent high foot traffic. How about we go to the appliance section and ask what's going on?"
"good!"
The two stood up and walked toward the home appliance section of the supermarket.
...
Chen Zhe first went to the TV display case.
He struck up a conversation with a salesperson: "Why are there so few people in the TV section?"
The salesperson replied, "Mr. Chen, there have been very few customers in the last month or two. Some people just come to look, but they don't buy anything, no matter how much we try to persuade them."
The salesperson looked somewhat troubled, after all, their salary was tied to sales volume.
"Are they complaining about the price?"
"Maybe, but the things in our supermarket aren't expensive, and we even have a slight advantage compared to online prices."
"So you don't think it's a price issue?"
“The price is a problem, but I don’t think it’s the biggest problem.”
Seeing that the salesperson seemed hesitant to speak, Chen Zhe smiled and encouraged him, "You can just say what you want to say. Let's just chat. Don't be nervous."
The salesperson nodded.
"Mr. Chen, to be honest, I personally feel that the reason why TVs aren't selling well might be because most people don't watch TV anymore. We live in the internet age now, and everyone has a mobile phone that can watch short videos and movies. They can already satisfy their spiritual needs with many things on their phones. As for TVs... I feel that only the older generation will watch them."
Chen Zhe nodded, thinking that what he said made some sense.
But Wang De, who was standing next to him, said, "Kids like to watch that too. Kids want to watch cartoons, right? They don't have cell phones, so they can only watch TV."
“Mr. Wang, kids will watch, but nowadays TVs all require memberships. When we buy a TV, our customers also need to buy a lot of memberships. Children’s channels require memberships, movie channels require memberships, drama channels require memberships, and these memberships are separate. The cost of buying these memberships may even exceed the price of the TV itself.”
"The problem you're talking about should be a long-term issue, but you just said it's only become less frequent in the last month or two. Where do you think the problem lies?"
"Well... I'm not too sure about that. Maybe people just don't have much of a desire to spend money lately."
"That can't be right, can it? Everyone's gotten a raise recently, how could they not have the desire to spend money? Your salary has increased too, right? Let me put it another way: if it were you, would you be willing to buy anything?"
The salesperson paused for a moment, seemingly hesitant.
"Mr. Chen, can I tell you the truth?"
"I want to hear the truth from you."
"Actually... if it were me, I wouldn't buy it either."
"Why?"
"Because the current economic climate is not good, I am hoping to put the money in the bank to save it after finally managing to save some money. I will not consider things that are not absolutely necessary for the time being."
Chen Zhe nodded thoughtfully.
He patted the salesperson on the shoulder.
"Okay, thank you for your answer."
He and Wang De went to other home appliance exhibition areas and got similar results.
Those salespeople themselves didn't have much desire to buy.
They returned to the office.
Wang De finally realized that the situation was more serious than they had imagined.
“Brother, this can’t go on. If we raise their wages, they’ll save all their money and won’t spend it. We won’t be able to sell any of our goods.”
"Well, that's actually normal. After all, everyone has some sense of crisis. Before, they would spend all their money each month without thinking too much. But now that their salaries have increased, they feel they can save, so naturally they are less willing to spend more money."
"What should we do with all this stock? We can't just let it rot in the warehouse, can we? We have contracts with those suppliers, and they won't give us discounts if we don't reach our sales targets."
After thinking for a long time, a similar case suddenly flashed through Chen Zhe's mind.
He immediately had an idea.
"Brother, I have an idea. I think we can do it like this..."
...
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