Looking at her notebook, Ji Meng calculated that her commission of 4.5 yuan plus a base salary of 1 yuan came to 5.5 yuan, which covered the money she spent yesterday on buying Qiuqiu a backpack, art supplies, notebooks, and pens.

She was barely satisfied with the result.

“You did great! Eight sales in just the morning—I underestimated you before!”

Meng Ling, seeing that her stall had no customers left, hurried over and noticed the bag at Ji Meng’s waist, her eyes shining with excitement.

She had been paying close attention to Ji Meng the whole time, with every sale Ji Meng made, she had taken note. If she hadn’t been busy, she would have rushed over much sooner.

How could there be such an impressive person?

In one day, she made as many sales as Meng Ling would in ten or fifteen days.

It really is different when you’re good-looking, isn’t it?

Meng Ling thought to herself and looked at the two rows of clothes Ji Meng had organized.

“To be honest, after you organize them like this, it really looks different. It gives the impression that they would fit well. Where did you learn to do this?”

Ji Meng tucked her notebook into her pocket and didn’t respond to Meng Ling. Instead, she looked at the clothes in front of her, pursed her lips, and asked:

“Have you counted how many pieces of unsold clothes you have in total?”

“Why are you asking this?” Meng Ling’s smile faltered upon hearing that.

Perhaps because of the various comparisons she had faced as a child, Meng Ling didn’t want Ji Meng to know her situation, she didn’t want to reveal that aspect of herself.

Although, she might have already figured it out.

After all, she was considered a “celebrity” in the alley now.

But people can hold on for a moment, she just didn’t want to say anything.

“Why are you asking so much? Just focus on selling. It’s not like your salary will be cut,” Meng Ling averted her eyes, refusing to answer.

“It won’t be cut, but I think selling like this is too slow.”

As Ji Meng spoke, she walked over to the unorganized cart in the middle and picked up a large red silk shirt to take a look.

The silk was of good quality, but unfortunately, the sleeves were uneven—one large and one small.

Most of the clothes in this pile had issues with the cutting, with only a few stained with grease spots.

To be honest, it was a pity, it was clear these were clothes meant for department stores, but she didn’t understand why they were sewn like this.

“You think selling this many orders in one morning is slow? How many do you want to sell in a day? You really have big dreams,” Zheng Wu, who had unknowingly approached, said coldly.

“I do think it’s slow.”

After several hours of selling, Ji Meng had regained her composure. She wasn’t the original body. Why should she feel guilty for the evil things done by the original body? She could help pay off the financial debts but wouldn’t shoulder emotional debts.

Having thought this through, Ji Meng now felt completely at ease. She responded to Zheng Wu with an untroubled expression and turned to Meng Ling:

“Meng Ling, you don’t need to put on a brave face in front of me. Don’t you want to clear out this stock to recover some funds?”

As Ji Meng spoke, her eyes swept over the several carts of clothes at the stall:

“I estimate there are at least a thousand pieces of stock here. You mentioned earlier that there are winter clothes in the warehouse, combined, there must be at least fifteen hundred, right?”

“Even if you get them at a cheap price, that’s still several thousand yuan…”

She didn’t finish the rest of her sentence.

Several thousand yuan was not a small amount at this time.

Meng Ling’s family was relatively well-off.

Aunt Lai worked at the Youth Office, Meng Ling’s father was the logistics director at the enamel factory, and her brother and sister-in-law both worked at a textile factory—one as a union worker and the other as a workshop leader.

But even with this family background, it would be quite a stretch to take out several thousand yuan for their daughter’s business venture.

Meng Ling was likely in significant debt outside.

Otherwise, she wouldn’t be trying various methods to make things work.

Meng Ling fell silent for a moment, then pressed her lips together and said,

“Counting the spring and winter clothes that aren’t defective, there are a total of over 1,560 pieces left, with more than 700 being defective.”

“There are about 300 winter clothes left in the warehouse, 100 coats, over 50 sweaters, and the rest are pants. None of those are defective, I brought them back from Yangcheng…”

As Meng Ling reported the numbers, it felt like a heavy stone had dropped in her heart. She had been under a lot of pressure these past few days.

She was deeply in debt.

Not only had her family’s finances been drained, but she also owed a lot of money outside.

A lot. She had borrowed from nearly everyone she knew.

Even Zheng Wu had to follow her around because she owed him money and couldn’t pay him back. He was hoping that when she earned some, she would pay him back first.

She never intended for things to turn out this way, at first, she just wanted to sell some clothes simply.

When she was sent to the countryside, a friend she got along well with at the youth station was from Yangcheng. After returning to the city, she got a job at a private clothing factory with decent pay.

At that time, she was working in a large collective with low wages and tedious tasks, and she was envious when she heard about her friend’s situation.

Knowing that many people in Yangcheng were doing business and setting up markets, and after seeing the news in the Beijing about educated people returning and opening tea houses earning nearly a hundred yuan a month, she felt tempted to start her own business.

Before diving into this, she first went to Yangcheng to visit her friend.

The development there was really good now, much livelier than the provincial capital.

Seeing the free markets there made her think that if she set something up like that when she returned, it wouldn’t be bad.

She knew many people here, and since her mother worked at the youth office, she was aware of the youth who hadn’t found jobs yet.

She thought it wouldn’t be difficult to persuade them one by one to set up a street market.

Once the market was established, she would sell clothes.

The clothes from Yangcheng were nearly half the price compared to the provincial capital, and they didn’t require coupons, so she felt she could make a profit easily.

However, she didn’t expect the final result to be so unsatisfactory, it was worse than selling homemade cloth on this street.

She couldn’t understand why her clothes were not as good as the clothes.

Last winter, the unsold winter stock only allowed her to break even, she didn’t make any money.

Originally, she wanted to give up, but she had already promised her family and those at the market that she would make money. If the first person she thought of for this venture backed out, it would be very embarrassing.

Unwilling to give up, she saw the crowd at the market gradually increasing and decided to tough it out for a while longer.

These people complained that the clothes were expensive, so she went to her brother and sister-in-law’s textile factory to get a batch of defective goods.

The large collective at the textile factory was established in conjunction with the clothing factory, and most of the workers were either just returning from the countryside or had recently graduated from middle school, with few knowing how to operate sewing machines.

Sewing wasn’t something that could be learned quickly, a few days of training wouldn’t amount to much.

Moreover, the pay was low, so everyone was looking for other opportunities to secure stable jobs. Very few were focused on their work, resulting in a significant amount of defective products being produced.

Most of them were basically scrap, the kind that wouldn’t even sell as rags.

She approached the management, who were eager to get rid of the defective goods. They wanted the batch to disappear from sight, so she managed to obtain 800 defective pieces for just 300 yuan.

As a result, when she got the goods in her hands, she realized they were truly defective—there were hardly any sellable items, and it was tough to sell even two pieces a day.

Recovering her costs was slow.

She’s short on money, so she had to think of a way out and made another trip to Yangcheng. She didn’t know if it was good luck or bad.

When she went to Yangcheng, she happened to encounter the boss of the factory where her friend from the youth station worked, who had racked up a lot of debt and absconded to Hong Kong with the money from the accounts and his mistress.

The workers had not been paid for three months and were also burdened with numerous debts owed to fabric suppliers outside.

The fabric suppliers took away the machines from the factory to sell and pay off their debts.

The workers couldn’t fight back and could only worry over a pile of clothes. Eventually, the municipal labor union advised them to find a way to clear the remaining goods in the factory to get their wages.

At that time, there were already many private clothing factories in Yangcheng, and the workers could make clothes but were unfamiliar with selling them.

They tried to package the clothes to sell to people on Shisanxing Road, but those people wanted to lower down the price.

If the price wasn’t high enough, the workers couldn’t make enough to cover their wages, leading to a deadlock.

Later on, the workers took the clothes back to sell for their wages.

The prices were very low, almost dirt cheap, even cheaper than buying from second-hand sellers, she could still make a profit selling them at double the price.

Moreover, these were all the latest spring styles, fashionable and even better-looking than those in department stores, with good fabric quality.

Meng Ling was immediately tempted. She pieced together borrowed money from various places and leveraged her connections with her friends at the youth station, finally bringing back over a thousand pieces of clothing.

She originally thought she would make a fortune from this.

However, the reality was that the clothes did not sell as well as she had imagined.

After asking many people and summarizing her experiences, she realized that the clothes she had brought were too youthful for the market. Most of the customers at the market were middle-aged women or elderly ladies who were thrifty.

If these women couldn’t wear the clothes, they wouldn’t buy them.

So even if she lowered the prices, she still couldn’t sell them, in fact, her business got worse than before.

Left with no choice, she had to source children’s clothing and some elderly wear that would sell, but business remained very difficult.

At this point, her debts had already piled up, and some people started to pressure her for repayment.

With no other options, she had to go back to her father again and ask him to help her get some defective enamel bowls and dishes to sell.

This time, she was smarter, she decided to take on debt to acquire goods first and pay later.

Sure enough, the enamel plates were quite popular, and her stall suddenly became lively, allowing her to sell two pieces of clothing as well.

However, it wasn’t enough, recovering her costs was too slow, and she still had debts to pay.

She could only continue to expand her stall.

Whatever people at the market needed, she would set up.

Since she knew people in almost every factory, it was not a problem to get some goods.

But as her stall grew larger, she couldn’t handle it all by herself, so she brought Zheng Wu in and ^[1]“painted a grand picture” means exaggerated or presented an overly optimistic vision of the business, making it seem more promising or successful than it actually was.painted a grand picture for him.

However, even with Zheng Wu on board, the situation didn’t improve, he was even less capable of selling.

The two of them looked at the pile of clothes and found it increasingly trashy. They had originally been somewhat neatly arranged but had ended up all bundled together, leading to the current state.

Every day, the clothes were just hanging around.

But if she didn’t get rid of this batch of clothes, it would seem that paying off her debts was a distant dream…

“If you can find a way to help me clear out those winter clothes, I can give you a bit more of the profits,”

Meng Ling gritted her lip as she thought about the abilities Ji Meng had just displayed. “For each winter piece, I’ll give you five cents—no, one yuan!”

“Winter clothes are more expensive. If you can help me sell them, I’ll give you one piece for each piece sold.”

“I think your method from earlier was pretty good, the spring clothes can still sell for a while. I’ll bring the winter clothes over this afternoon, and you can try selling them using the same approach.”

One piece of clothing meant one profit, three hundred pieces would be three hundred yuan.

Ji Meng had to admit that she was damned tempted.

Especially since she had her own motives regarding Meng Ling.

At present, she truly needed help to get out of her predicament.

“Sure,” Ji Meng said, her mind racing as she agreed.

“But I need you to prepare some things. We’ll need them this afternoon. It’s not very busy now, so you can start preparing right away. Then, this afternoon, you all need to pack up those stalls. We’re going to go all out…”

Ji Meng said this while glancing at Meng Ling and casually added, “If you follow my lead, barring any surprises, I can help you clear out this batch of clothes in ten days. Also, I can give you some ideas on how to deal with your defective items.”

“Ten—ten days!”

When Ji Meng finished speaking, both Meng Ling and Zheng Wu were stunned.

Zheng Wu glanced at her, examining her as if he wanted to re-evaluate this person, while Meng Ling blurted out without thinking, “That’s impossible!”

“Selling over a thousand pieces of clothing in ten days means we’d need to sell at least a hundred pieces a day—that’s simply absurd.”

“Ji Meng, I admit you did pretty well in the morning, but you might not be familiar with this market. Most of the people who come here are just housewives shopping for groceries. In the afternoon, there might be some younger women leaving the factories, but they rarely buy things from here, they want to maintain a face and look down on it.”

Meng Ling had tried this before, she had attempted to distribute flyers at factories with many young girls, like textile and cotton spinning factories, but very few came by.

Only on two occasions did young girls show up, and that was during the cultural performance she organized last year, but they just came to watch the fun and rarely bought anything.

Meng Ling explained the situation to Ji Meng in detail and paused before adding:

“Besides, you saw how busy our soap business was, yet we only sold this little!”

“Clothes aren’t soap and perfume, they aren’t cheap, and there aren’t that many people buying them.”

Meng Ling’s words caught Ji Meng’s attention. To be honest, Meng Ling was already quite impressive. When Ji Meng heard from Ji Qinghe that Meng Ling had managed to create an entire street on her own, she thought highly of her abilities.

Seeing her bustling around in the morning only reinforced that impression.

When Meng Ling mentioned finding ways to attract customers, Ji Meng wasn’t surprised.

One important piece of information Meng Ling provided was something Ji Meng had overlooked earlier: girls at this time weren’t yet accustomed to buying from street vendors, they felt it would affect their image…

It was unexpected yet not surprising.

Street markets now might be similar to when Taobao first started around 2000, where few people accepted it and viewed it as a ^[2]“Knockoff” refers to a product that imitates or copies another, often well-known, brand or item but is generally of lower quality. It’s usually made to look similar to a popular or … Continue readingknockoff.

If that were the case, Ji Meng’s original plan would indeed be unworkable.

She needed to think of a way to make everyone feel that buying these clothes was particularly stylish.

Ji Meng ran through a few plans in her mind before finally looking at Meng Ling:

“I have a way to solve the traffic problem and ensure the goods sell out while maintaining the market’s popularity afterward. However, it might require a larger venue and a day or two of work. Can you cooperate?”

Meng Ling took a deep breath to keep herself calm and after a moment replied:

“If you can help me get rid of these clothes in ten days, I’ll not only cooperate with you, I’d be willing to ^[3]“Work like a horse” means to work very hard or tirelessly, often implying that the person is putting in a great deal of effort or labor, similar to the way horses have historically been … Continue readingwork like a horse for you from then on!”

Hearing this, Ji Meng laughed, “You said it!”