Princess of the 19th Century Department Store - Chapter 18

Chapter 18

Daisy had a sausage speared on her fork in one hand, while her other hand flipped through a small leather notebook filled with dense notes.

“First, the essentials are the simplest sliced bread and sweet hard biscuits.

“At ordinary bakeries and grocery stores, the cheapest bread costs three pence a pound, and biscuits are six pence.

“We’ll have to match those prices, or we won’t be competitive.

“But on top of the most basic version, we can make small changes to both.

“The bread can come in sweet and savory flavors.

“For example, raisin bread and garlic bread. We don’t need to add much, just enough to give it a little more flavor.”

Plenty of people bought bread from grocery stores, mainly because it saved them from lighting a stove and burning coal themselves, and because it was quick and easy to eat on the go.

For instance, the large numbers of carriage drivers and early-shift workers.

Daisy made a note in her little book, then continued, “The hard biscuits can also come in black tea or coffee flavors. Neither would cost much more to make.”

Both drinks were popular with the locals at the moment, so those flavors would be easy for customers to accept.

“Next are bacon sandwiches and Diamond Cookies.

“As for candy, wholesale hard candy is already cheap enough.

“We might as well make some milk chocolate squares to sell, packed into small pieces so people can have one for three farthings.”

Daisy’s experience in her previous life told her to research the public’s tastes and trust the market’s choice.

If she wanted to make money from this, she couldn’t arrogantly look down on local preferences and culture. She had to get as close to local life as possible.

“For jarred sauces, aside from jam, we can also make some meat-based canned sauces, like meat sauce with tomato, or minced meat with pesto.

“I’ve seen a lot of canned meat-broth pudding on the market too. In fact, we can absolutely make that as well.”

Meat-broth pudding was what people commonly called meat jelly. As a cheap food that still tasted meaty, it was mostly sold by street vendors and was very popular.

She spoke with perfect confidence, listing more than a dozen possible products in one breath, while everyone around the table listened carefully.

As Daisy talked, she lifted her fork and took a bite of sausage. Halfway through chewing, she suddenly asked Mary, “Which shop did you buy this sausage from? How much was it per link?

“It tastes pretty good. Could you ask them if they do wholesale?”

Mary agreed seriously.

After dinner, mother and daughter continued narrowing down the products.

From the dozen or so easy-to-make items, they kept seven that were suitable for selling on Clark Street.

Then they roughly worked out a budget and compiled the recipes and costs into lists.

With those lists in hand, they climbed upstairs, planning to ask Lisa for advice.

If they wanted to develop these products, they would still need to invest some money.

First of all, the stove at home was too small. They would need to replace it with a larger iron oven-stove for baking and simmering.

But once they changed the stove, they would burn more coal, and they would also need to purchase packaging materials and food ingredients.

At the moment, however, there were only four or five pounds in the counter drawer. If they bought all that, they would not have enough ready cash to purchase other stock, so they had to go to Lisa for help.

Daisy was very comfortable with the business of pulling in investment.

In the narrow bedroom, Lisa had just finished dinner as well. Mr. Nash had only just carried the plates away, and the door was open.

Perhaps because business had been good these past two days, her mood had improved considerably, and her body had benefited from it too.

Unlike the usual sighing whenever the subject came up, she was full of energy now. She leaned against the small sofa with a cotton-thread blanket over her, mending a torn cotton dress in her hands, with a pair of reading glasses perched beneath her eyes.

Daisy and Mary pushed the door open and came in first, reporting the day’s accounts.

The old lady still found it unbelievable that they had made more than a pound in profit today.

“Selling it by the bag at three farthings… Why didn’t I think of that? I really am old…”

Seeing her fall silent for a while, Daisy took out the list of six cooked foods they had selected and handed it to the old lady to look over.

Lisa simply put down the needlework in her hands and began reading through the items mother and daughter were preparing to make with full attention.

There were canned meat-broth pudding, canned cinnamon apricot sauce, coffee-flavored biscuits, Diamond Cookies, garlic bread, and raisin bread.

Daisy’s plan was to offer only six kinds of cooked foods at a time, review the numbers once a week, and eliminate whichever cooked food sold the least, replacing it with a new one.

With only six cooked foods offered at once, the kitchen could manage the daily workload, and they would not have to stock too many ingredients.

Lisa was an extremely shrewd person. After managing the shop for so many years, she could tell at a glance that coming up with these products truly required a sharp mind.

The costs were controllable, there was a market so sales would not be a problem, and everything could be produced in their own small kitchen. The procedures were not complicated.

As long as they put a little thought into adjusting the flavors, they would not have to worry about no one buying them.

Lisa knew every detail of how Daisy had run the shop these past few days. At this moment, she suddenly felt as if she had been blind with her eyes wide open all these years.

Someone with such a gift for business had been living right under her nose for so many years, and she had never noticed.

Lisa let out a long breath. “With you two handling things together, I can rest easy.”

As she spoke, she took off her glasses, pulled a key from her bosom, handed it to Mary, and said, “You two keep the money box from now on. I’m already a bag of old bones. From now on, the affairs of this family will have to be handled by you younger ones.”

Mary was still standing there in a daze when Daisy reached out, took the key, stuffed it into her hand, and nodded on her behalf. “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of it.”

Lisa had worried over the family for so many years. Seeing the younger generation willing to shoulder responsibility, she could finally breathe a little easier.

A while later, Daisy and Mary came out carrying the money box. On the narrow staircase, they looked at each other, and then back again.
Mary thought it over for a long while, then said to Daisy, “My head just isn’t made for this. I can cook well enough, but handling money? I really can’t. You’d better keep these things safe.”

Daisy nodded without the slightest attempt to refuse and took the key and cash box into her arms.

“Leave it to me. You can rest easy.”

Mary murmured an assent, then went downstairs to boil several kettles of hot water for the family to wash up with. She still had to wash Penny’s hair tonight.

Daisy carried the cash box in the dark up into the cramped attic, opened the clothes chest, and tucked the money deep inside.

She knew there were still twenty-seven or twenty-eight pounds in it. She also went and brought in the thousand-odd pennies from the counter drawer to store them together, locked everything up properly, and planned to take out some change in the morning.

In present-day London, food, clothing, housing, and travel were all expensive. This truly was no small sum. It would take every member of an ordinary family years of diligent work to save up this much.

And in the newspapers Daisy could read, there were many advertisements for goods.

Thirty pounds could buy a fine horse in London, or a small flock of lambs in the countryside.

It could buy an acre of fertile farmland north of London.

It was also the equivalent of a dozen or twenty pounds of tea leaves from Gaddlow’s Department Store.

But if one looked further up the social ladder, it was merely the cost of having a portrait painted, or purchasing a Hangzhou silk evening gown, or paying for a month’s theater box subscription.

In England in this era, industry was developing rapidly, labor was cheaper than ever, and the gap between rich and poor was wider than ever.

Daisy sat calmly by the window, raised the pressure on the gas lamp a little, then turned the brightness higher. After that, she began completing today’s reading plan.

She had already more or less finished reading the old books and newspapers in the storeroom that were used to wrap goods.

After this, she would have no choice but to get a monthly pass at a commercial lending library.

Given that the original body’s age was only fifteen, soon to be sixteen, and she was under twenty-one without a guarantor of social credit…

She still could not enter the grand British Library and read for free.

That night, by the time Daisy finished reading and washed up, it was already past ten.

Before dawn the next morning, while the sky was still dark, all of Clark Street was shrouded in smog, and cold air seeped through the entire attic.

It was far too early for school. Penny was still lazing under the covers, mumbling in her dreams about biscuits and candy.

Daisy had already climbed out of bed early, tidied herself up, wrapped herself in a thick shawl, and prepared to set out with Mary to Whitechapel Road to purchase stock.

There were not many milk-delivery customers today, so Fred could handle them alone, while Mr. Nash stayed home to help watch the shop.

Outside the front door, a light drizzle drifted through the fog, and the road was slippery. The two of them had to share an umbrella, and Daisy very naturally took Mary’s arm.

She took out a crumpled page of notes and went over today’s shopping list with Mary.

Today’s total budget was ten pounds. Half would be used to buy regular goods wholesale, and half to purchase ingredients and tools for making cooked food.

After leaving the alley and reaching Jude Road, their first stop was the coal shop they always patronized, where they needed to reserve next week’s coal and settle last week’s bill.

This coal shop was not small. It stood beside a coffin shop and was already open, with a gas lamp hanging beneath the eaves.

At this hour, several freight carriages from the suburban coalworks were parked along the curb outside the coal shop.

The carriages were loaded with baskets of coal, meant to be delivered to the small restaurants along Dorothy Street.

Daisy had read in the newspapers that England had abundant reserves of raw coal, and many coalfields lay in shallow seams, making them easy to mine. Coal mines were not expensive either.

For only a few thousand pounds, one could buy the mining rights to a coalfield in York.

Raw coal from farther away would be transported by rail to the coalworks on the outskirts of London.

The large pieces would be swept into furnaces and coked for forging steel, while the small fragments and raw coal slag were sold into the city and entered ordinary households.

The two of them walked into the shop. Behind the narrow counter stood a young clerk in a black felt hat. He was the coal shop owner’s nephew, named Oliver.

“We’ve come to settle last week’s account,” Mary said to him.

Oliver nodded and asked with real concern, “Is Lisa any better?”

“Much better.”

Oliver opened the account book and found their name.

Generally, small shopkeepers nearby who had business licenses could buy a week’s worth of coal on credit from his shop, then pay the following week once they had more cash on hand.

“That’s good. Mm, last week it was… five bushels of small coal, right? Thirty-two pennies in total,” Oliver said.

Mary untied the household expense purse, but Daisy stopped her and paid from the purchasing funds instead.

“Next week, we’ll need quite a bit more coal. We’ll deposit thirty pennies with you first for five bushels of coal.

Starting next week, deliver one bushel to our door each day. The week after that, I’ll come settle the cost of the other two bushels. How does that sound?”

It was Oliver’s first time encountering this sort of bargaining method, but considering that their demand was not small, he nodded and agreed.

After paying and settling the account, the two of them left the coal shop and continued toward Whitechapel Road.

Mary had seen Daisy sell plenty of things, but this was her first time watching Daisy buy things.

She had never imagined Daisy would be willing to haggle over two pennies.

Daisy answered leisurely, “Two pennies are still money. Costs should naturally be saved wherever they can.

Besides, time is a cost too. Two pennies per hour.”

Mary narrowed her eyes, unable to understand but somehow impressed.

…