Chapter 140 Opening Day (1)
The next morning, when the light first appeared, Jiangyou got up early.
Although the store officially opens at 10 o'clock, there are still many preparations to be made for the opening of the new store - receiving the delivered ingredients, mixing rice milk, making roast meat... and communicating with Lolisa through the contact book to see if there is anything that needs to be handled at the branch.
Jiangyou also planned to use the millet she bought from the Witch Forest to make some rice wine. When she cooked, she always felt that the food tasted a little off without the rice wine from her hometown to remove the fishy smell.
She skipped downstairs, first dug out a folding wooden sign from the miscellaneous items piled in the basement, and propped it up at the entrance of the courtyard.
It's a bit like the blackboards at the entrance of coffee shops and snack bars that display today's menu, but instead of writing with chalk or paint pens, the words can be made to appear directly using magic.
Jiang You thought for a moment and wrote on the sign:
Opening today! Serving fruity beer, delicious dishes, and versatile sauces!
Today's special dish: Basic rice noodle rolls for 5 nibs/portion, with optional toppings for 3 nibs/portion
Business hours: Dine-in 10:00-17:00, takeaway 14:00-22:00
She also hung a small bamboo basket next to the sign and stuffed takeout flyers into the basket so that passers-by could take them.
Just as she finished this, two donkey carts drove up from the corner of the street.
"Hey! Lich, is this the dish you ordered?" The middle-aged Hafu driver raised his beret and shouted to Jiang You from a distance, "Master Holly sent me to deliver the goods!"
"Yes!" Jiang You waved to him and opened the gate: "Please unload the goods to the drying area in the backyard, thank you!"
The Hafu driver hurriedly parked his car and went to load the goods onto the cart. He had to ask Jiangyou to confirm the quantity and status of each basket of vegetables before he was willing to deliver it to the backyard.
Just as Jiang You was at a loss for words—fortunately, her skull face couldn't show either laughter or tears when her magic power wasn't released—a second cart pulled up, and a young, strong wolf-beast with sleek fur jumped down from the driver's seat. "Hello, store manager. I'm here to deliver the meat for Father Dora."
"Okay, okay," said Jiang You, "Please help me move it to the backyard. I'll check it out right away."
After a flurry of activity, the goods were finally received. Jiang You paid the wolf orc for the goods and gave the receipt to the Haf driver before sending the two away.
She closed the gate and walked to the backyard. She put her hands on her hips and glanced at the food scattered on the ground. She clenched her bony claws into fists and encouraged herself: "Come on! Get to work!"
Today Uncle Wolf brought some very good beef, including tenderloin and shank, both very fresh, and you can tell they were just slaughtered cows.
——Jiangyou was lucky enough to catch the opportunity.
Takumi had asked Uncle Wolf about his family's ranch back in the Witch Forest. They only slaughtered the animals in the mornings. After slaughter, the meat was immediately packed into insulated boxes filled with ice and quickly delivered to customers who had placed orders.
After satisfying the needs of customers who have pre-ordered meat, the remaining meat will be sent to nearby markets and fairs for sale. They will not miss large-scale festivals like the one in Witch Forest.
Small poultry like chickens, ducks, and geese can be slaughtered in whatever quantities are ordered. However, the slaughter of larger livestock like cattle, pigs, and sheep depends on whether there are large customers placing orders. After all, livestock has a large meat yield. An adult beef cattle weighing 800-1000 jin (1500-2000 kg) can produce approximately 400-600 jin (1500-2000 kg) of meat (with bones). For casual customers who only want a steak, a rib, or even a leg, Uncle Wolf won't even touch them.
The ice-insulated box used by Uncle Wolf has limited preservation ability. If the meat is not sold in time, it will become smelly and rotten, and they will suffer a huge loss.
Therefore, Uncle Wolf will generally sharpen his knife to hunt pigs and sheep only when a big customer places a large order of more than half a livestock, or when multiple customers send orders and the amount of meat reaches more than half a livestock.
After selling the bulk of the meat to these customers, Uncle Wolf can basically break even on the cost. As for the remaining meat, it can be quickly sold out through multiple channels and markets, so it is not easy to incur losses.
This sales method directly leads to large customers or customers who buy together bearing almost half of the selling price of livestock.
As meat prices fluctuate, the market value of a cow is roughly three to five gold coins, and Uncle Wolf will only slaughter it if he earns at least two to four gold coins. However, the price of leftover unclaimed meat often plummets over time due to the need to sell it quickly.
The reason why Jiangyou was able to buy meat at such a cheap price in the Witch Forest was because she happened to happen to be at a good time when Uncle Wolf was clearing out his meat.
Jiangyou is short of money now and the amount of meat she ordered is not much, so she naturally cannot afford to buy half a cow or half a pig at once. She can only tell Uncle Wolf the weight of the meat and ask him to give her whatever he has. She does not mind all the internal organs and accepts them all.
So, buying meat felt like opening a blind box. But the price of the random meats was much lower than ordering specific meats. For the money, Jiangyou thought—it was delicious.
"Hey, when I have enough money to buy whole cows and pigs, I must have Uncle Wolf slaughter the cows for me on time, have the rice cakes delivered quickly, and have the fresh meat on the table within three hours..." Jiang You muttered, "Oh, that's not right. I have to make sure there are customers first, otherwise the cost of those few gold coins will be wasted."
This is the dilemma faced by most restaurants when operating: under the premise that the store owner does not go crazy, the more customers there are, the faster the ingredients will be updated and the fresher the food will be; but if there are few customers, with only a few customers coming every day, a large amount of ingredients will not be used up, but they have to keep them in stock. The merchants can either bite their teeth and bear the cost by discarding a large amount of ingredients and replacing them with new ones every day, or... they have to use all kinds of tricks to "save costs."
Of course, there are legitimate and legal methods, as well as unethical ones. However, whether it is serving customers long-frozen, expired ingredients, or having most of the dishes on the menu out of stock, it will give customers a very bad experience and they will never come back.
Therefore, stores with good business performance will have a virtuous cycle, while stores with poor business performance will fall into a vicious cycle and continue to decline. The first few days of opening a store are crucial to determining which cycle the store will enter.
Beef tenderloin can be used to make beef rice noodle rolls, while beef shank can be used to make versatile cold dishes like braised beef. Besides these two types of beef, there's also quite a bit of pork belly and offal, along with over a dozen chickens and ducks. Jiangyou quickly sorts the various meats into their respective categories, refrigerating what needs to go, roasting what needs to go, and braising what needs to go into the braising pot...
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