When She Stops Being Dramatic

Chapter 414: Chapter 149: The Green Tea Female Side Character in the Period Novel (36)

”And then there are the restaurants and guest houses. They all need to be set up to suit everyone’s spending habits. So, don’t let everyone get complacent. We have to keep up the pace of learning...”

Xu Chengfang nodded repeatedly. ”I’ll call their families to let them know later.”

They took stock of the goods and noted down what needed to be restocked.

Before long, the goods from the manufacturers, the finished products from the cafeteria, and the items Zhao Jinming had procured arrived one after another.

The two aunties each had a tricycle. Iron rings had been welded onto them to secure three stoves, with pots holding tea eggs, buns, and Chi Yun’er’s clever imitation of oden.

The oden was simmered in a rich broth and included both meat and vegetables. The meat was pre-cooked, frozen overnight in a refrigerator, and then stored together in a foam box. It was cooked to order—delicious, nutritious, convenient, and minimized waste!

The buns were also stewed in a large-bone broth. Even the vegetarian ones were so tempting they made your mouth water.

The carts also carried a wooden bucket of rice and two steamers of mantou to go with the oden.

In addition, there were ice-cold sodas, various popsicles, the most popular candies and pastries for gifting, cigarettes, matches, and other hot-selling items!

Of course, to cater to the spending levels of different salary grades, Chi Yun’er also had the cafeteria prepare a large amount of sweet mung bean soup. After chilling in the refrigerator for a while, its flavor, texture, and ability to quench thirst and cool you down were no worse than soda.

Since they had mung bean soup, Chi Yun’er also thought of herbal teas, which would become extremely popular in the future. She planned to add them to the menu in the coming days, things like sweet chrysanthemum tea, sweet black tea, sweet green tea, fruit teas, and so on...

As long as it was iced, any tea instantly became a higher-grade beverage.

Add a large sun umbrella, a few folding stools, bowls, and chopsticks, and they were all set!

The hospital grounds were vast, surrounded by major roads on all four sides. For convenient access, there were four gates for entry and exit.

There was a supply and marketing cooperative across from the hospital’s main entrance, and the outpatient department already had its own shop, so there was no need to establish a new spot at that gate for now.

One cart was placed at the entrance/exit for the family housing and the hospital, and another was set up at the gate facing the residential areas of several other work units.

The two women registered the quantity of goods they were taking with Xu Chengfang. Then, they put on the aprons, sleeve protectors, and hats provided by the kitchen and, with a mix of nervousness and excitement, pedaled their tricycles off to their respective ”battlefields”!

Their carts also displayed wooden signs that read ”Mobile Convenience Station.”

Once they had left, Xu Chengfang couldn’t sit still and grew nervous herself. ”Yunyun, how do you think their sales will be?”

’These Mobile Convenience Stations are a novelty. I wonder how well people will accept them.’

Chi Yun’er smiled and said, ”The hospital has a huge amount of foot traffic. No matter what, things will sell. What’s there to worry about?”

It wasn’t hard to open the convenience store. As long as people knew things were sold here, that the prices were fair and the variety was good, there was no doubt it would be profitable. It was just a matter of how much.

She was now just waiting for the new employees to report for duty. Once they did, she could step back and move on to other things!

The convenience store had to be equipped with everything the Mobile Convenience Stations had. A row of small stoves was set up outside, offering tea eggs, oden, and entire steamers of buns.

The aroma of each item was incredibly enticing, wafting tantalizingly to draw people in.

Employees who were a bit more particular about their lifestyle and didn’t have heavy family burdens couldn’t help but go up and ask.

The buns were the same price as in restaurants and the cafeteria, the tea eggs cost one cent more than regular eggs, and the oden was sold by the skewer. There were also steaming hot mantou and rice, along with a top-notch selection of rich and varied pickled vegetables!

The prices weren’t expensive, and many people bought a little something to try. In an era when even eating meat was a luxury, these foods were undeniably rich and nutritious. More importantly, they were delicious.

Many people had grown averse to the cafeteria food. They were too lazy to cook for themselves, and eating out was expensive, so this place became the perfect spot to get a change of pace.

The convenience store gradually got on track. With its full range of goods, wide scope of business, and three sales points—including the 24-hour convenience store itself—the total daily profit at the main hospital, with its explosive foot traffic, was already fluctuating around three hundred yuan.

When salaries were paid the next month, Chi Yun’er’s base pay and subsidies came to seventy-three yuan. Now, with a two-percent commission on the convenience store’s total profit as a bonus, she earned an additional one hundred eighty-five yuan, for a total of two hundred fifty-eight yuan. This already surpassed the combined salaries of Mr. Chi and Mrs. Chi!

Zhao Jinming and Xu Chengfang each received a 0.5 percent commission. Their base pay, subsidies, and bonus combined came to just over one hundred yuan. Among the crowd of young people and former classmates just entering the workforce, this was absolutely top-tier!

They were ecstatic when they got their salaries, saying they’d never had so much money before. The problem was, they would be earning about the same amount every month, so much that they didn’t even know how to spend it...

The kitchen staff simmered broth, steamed buns, mantou, and rice, and made meatballs, sausages, and fried tofu every day. The work wasn’t tiring, just a bit tedious.

The food items at the convenience store sold like hotcakes. Customers were endless from morning till night, and these sales contributed nearly half of the total profit.

As a result, the kitchen staff never had much downtime.

But the returns were extremely generous. Six percent of the profits earned from food sales was distributed as bonuses, awarded according to the degree of effort.

The kitchen employees received extra bonuses ranging from ten to thirty yuan this month. Every single one of them was brimming with motivation.

The two aunties’ commission was three percent of the profit from the goods they sold. The items on their tricycles were all bestsellers, requiring them to make three to five restocking trips a day. Their daily profit fluctuated around fifty yuan.

When it was time to collect their pay, they looked at the over forty yuan in their hands and were so happy they almost cried. For a family, over forty yuan could bring about a world of change in their lives.

By this time, the new employees had returned from the countryside to report for duty, filled with disbelief. Standing at the entrance of the convenience store, they still felt like they were in a dream they couldn’t wake up from.

They were all high school graduates—quick-witted, savvy, and tempered by their time in the countryside. They were steady, hardworking, and adapted well to their new jobs.

Chi Yun’er and the others instantly felt their workload decrease dramatically.

The convenience store had entered a virtuous cycle. Chi Yun’er, along with Zhao Jinming and Xu Chengfang, now set her sights on the restaurant business.

Across from the hospital was a state-owned restaurant. The food was average, though the head chef’s noodle dishes were decent. Whether it was for visiting relatives and friends or treating someone to a meal out, it was the only option.

With no competition, there was no pressure to improve. The restaurant’s waiters were rude, fawning over the powerful and scorning the weak. They had once even angered an old man so badly that he ended up hospitalized. Their reputation was anything but good.

So, Chi Yun’er figured that if she opened a new restaurant, she would have no shortage of customers. As long as the cooking was good, any customer turned away by the state-owned restaurant would come to theirs.

Then there was the cafeteria. The cafeteria served food cooked in large batches, which didn’t require high culinary skill. The taste was ordinary—not bad, but certainly not delicious. It just left people’s taste buds with nothing to look forward to day after day, numbing them into submission.

Moreover, the cafeteria’s menu wasn’t like those of later eras, with their wide variety. Here, it was just a standard spread of two meat and four vegetable dishes, giving people barely any choice.

The hospital cafeteria did have an extra window for patient meals, but other than that, there was nothing worth mentioning.

Chi Yun’er thought of all the various food and beverage businesses that would flourish in the future. She took her two followers around to look at different places, discussing things from time to time. In the end, she wrote up a polished restaurant proposal, which the three of them submitted to the dean together.

The dean put on his reading glasses and first glanced at the three of them.

Chi Yun’er hadn’t changed much; it was more that she maintained her usual brilliance and eye-catching presence.

Zhao Jinming and Xu Chengfang, however, were like entirely new people. From their clothes and grooming to their speech and demeanor, and even the vibrant energy they exuded, they had emerged from their cocoons like butterflies, having grown at an incredible speed.

The dean chuckled and lowered his head to read the proposal carefully.