Princess of the 19th Century Department Store - Chapter 3

Chapter 3

She took out coins in small denominations, counted out three pounds, then locked it back up and returned the key to Lisa.

Half of the family’s savings were tied up in the grocery store’s stock, which was worth a little over forty pounds.

The thirty pounds in cash was already half of the family’s savings, but it was only enough to cover half a year’s rent.

That money was Lisa’s lifeline. Spending even a single penny of it made her heart ache.

The only reason she had touched it was because the shop had lost money last month. With the murders causing such a stir outside, even their walk-in business had been cut in half.

There was no profit on the books to buy new stock, so they could only dip into her capital.

At that moment, Lisa honestly wanted to hang herself.

She carefully tucked the key back inside her clothes. Afraid Daisy would not understand, she reminded her again, “Check the shelves. There’s an inventory list in the drawer under my counter, along with the purchase receipts.

“Restock whatever we’re short on. Use the prices from my old receipts. If they charge too much, visit a few more wholesalers.

“If anyone dares try to cheat you on purpose, tell them that once I’m better, I won’t let them off!”

When Daisy’s father, Fred, had gone to restock, he had been taken for a ride by a liquor wholesaler named Ronald.

He had gotten the bottle sizes mixed up for the glass-bottled gin.

Lisa had already made plans. As soon as she recovered, she would go straight to Ronald and make him pay. She would let everyone on Albans Street know his family shorted their customers.

Daisy answered, then carried the plate and the money downstairs, following the narrow staircase down to the first floor.

The first floor was narrow too. Most of the space at the front was taken up by the shop, while the stairs faced the kitchen and a small storage room.

Inside the dim, windowless storage room stood a row of cribs, where five very young infants were sleeping.

The neighbors had brought them over. For two pence a day per child, their parents could have Mary look after them for the whole day.

Milk or goat’s milk cost extra and counted as additional income. Some people brought their own, so it was not a fixed amount.

Most of these neighbors worked in the various small factories nearby on Jude Road.

The women went back to work two or three months after giving birth, which had given rise to all sorts of cheap childcare.

The women who provided cheap childcare were mostly women who had to look after their families and could not go out to work.

Daisy turned sideways and squeezed out of the cramped stairwell into the kitchen, then tossed the plate into the ceramic basin sink filled with used water.

The kitchen was about seven or eight square meters. There was a back door leading to a half-meter-wide open drain, and a glass window beside the door.

By the window sat a coal stove and the sink, along with a cupboard. On top of the cupboard were spice jars and a gas lamp.

Against the left wall stood a small table that served as both cutting board and dining table, with a little stool beside it.

Against the right wall stood a basin rack, covered entirely with enamel basins.

The kitchen was dark and damp, and the brick walls were peeling.

But compared to the kitchens shared by three or four households in the neighboring buildings, these conditions were already considered good.

Daisy first went to the stove and lifted down the large tin kettle.

Then she found the washbasin she shared with Penny and poured a little hot water into it.

On the kitchen windowsill, she found the toothbrush and tooth powder the original Daisy used.

After washing her face, she rinsed her mouth over a bucket of dirty water.

Mary was warming milk on the coal stove, preparing to feed the neighbors’ children.

When she saw Daisy finish washing up and head toward the front to sort the goods on an empty stomach, she put down what she was holding, grabbed the slice of bread from the table, and chased after her.

Without even noticing Daisy’s stunned expression, she impatiently shoved it into her hand.

“Honestly, how can you even forget to eat…”

Before Daisy could say anything, Mary turned around and went back to warming the milk.

Left with no choice, Daisy could only take the dry piece of butter-fried bread and stuff it into her mouth, finishing it in a few bites.

Out in the grocery store, Hank had used the time while waiting for Daisy to sit behind the counter and eat his own breakfast.

It was still two slices of bread spread with butter.

Daisy remembered that the original Daisy’s father and grandfather delivered milk outside, and the two of them earned eight pounds a month between them.

Mary looked after the neighbors’ children at home. She cared for five children in total and could make a net profit of two or three pounds a month.

As for the small grocery store, when business was good, it could earn six to eight pounds a month.

Last month, business had been bad, and it had only made three or four pounds.

So the family’s income last month had been lower than usual, totaling fourteen pounds.
Everything was handed over to Grandmother to manage.

After paying five pounds in rent, she had nine pounds left.

Out of that, two pounds had to go toward Daisy’s school fees for last month.

That left seven pounds. Then they still had to deduct the renewal fee for the public water pump, which was four shillings a month.

The drain maintenance fee was three shillings.

The shop tax was sixpence, and the tobacco, liquor, and tea duty was another sixpence. Together, those two came to one shilling.

That left six pounds and twelve shillings. Grandmother gave Mary five pounds for a month’s worth of food expenses.

Add in a few odds and ends, and there was basically nothing left.

This month, if they needed to restock or ran into the slightest trouble, they would have to dip into the last bit of money Lisa had scrimped and saved over the years.

Daisy silently did the sums. If the shop kept going like this, this month’s income would drop even further.

If the shop’s earnings couldn’t even cover the rent, then there really would be no point in her continuing school.

In any case, everything they taught at school was something she had already learned in her previous life.

She lifted the cloth curtain separating the sales floor from the stairwell and stepped out.

The shop area before her was not large, only about ten square meters. The doorway was small, the windows were narrow and dirty, and the whole place was terribly dim.

In that tiny ten-square-meter space, there were eight tall counters.

There were also two low counters, arranged in the room in a half-enclosed shape, like the Chinese character for “day.”

It looked a little like a bank service window.

Normally, when customers wanted to buy something, they couldn’t pick it out themselves. They had to rely on the owner to take items from behind the counter and hand them over.

With this kind of setup, if the shopkeeper wasn’t familiar with the goods, everything would quickly become a flustered mess.

And if the shopkeeper wasn’t good with words and didn’t know how to make recommendations, each sale would amount to very little.

Grandfather Hank was sitting crookedly behind the cheap cigar counter.

He had wolfed down his meal in a couple of bites, then used a chipped porcelain cup to brew some dregs from the cheap tea leaves.

Daisy found the inventory list in a drawer beneath the cigar display case.

On the yellowed white paper were blurred strokes written with a quill pen.

Everything on it had been listed by Lisa.

There were around a hundred types of goods in total.

Fast-moving items were marked in red ink, while items with large stockpiles were marked in green ink.

Aside from Lisa, no one could usually make any sense of this list.

When Hank saw Daisy checking the list against the shelves with smooth, practiced movements, he was slightly surprised.

“You can understand that inventory list now?”

Daisy was beside the canned goods shelf. She didn’t even turn her head, only gave a soft, “Mm.”

In her previous life, when she had first started working as a wholesaler with her business partner, she had had to wear many hats.

Every day, she had faced all kinds of messy shipping documents, and everyone kept accounts in a slightly different way.

After doing it long enough, she only needed to glance over a document to understand the logic behind the way each person had written it.

In Daisy’s eyes, this grocery shop might be small, but it was riddled with loopholes and problems everywhere.

First was the sanitation. These display cases were probably all secondhand, giving off a stuffy old-wood smell. Some parts were so damp they were close to rotting, and they might even grow mold if left alone.

Replacing the cases wasn’t realistic. At most, she thought, they could find some tung oil or wood wax and brush it on as a bit of damage control.

Inside the cases, no one had the time to wipe them down carefully either. During the time Lisa had been bedridden, a layer of dust had settled over both the cases and the windows.

Then there was the way the goods were displayed.

Last time, the original body’s father, Fred, had gone out to purchase a batch of ketchup and cocoa powder tins.

In his lack of experience, he had arranged them carelessly, pressing all the older stock into the back rows.

These days, canned foods usually did not have clear production dates, but manufacturers would mark the production batch on the bottom of the bottle.

The smaller the batch number, the older the production date.

Canned food packaging was not as standardized or tightly sealed as it would be in later generations.

There were still many shoddy small canning workshops in London.

If stored for too long, cans could still swell, leak air, get damp, and turn the food inside stale.

If they sold spoiled food and someone reported them to the sanitary inspector, they would be fined again.

Whether it was dumping excrement out the window or selling rotten food, this sanitary inspector had the authority to impose fines, usually several shillings at a time.

Every month, Lisa would slip the inspector a box of cheap cigars worth a few shillings as a bribe.

That way, if something really did go wrong, or if someone deliberately tried to make trouble, they would have some protection.

Still, not knowing to check the dates was indeed the sort of small mistake that people who did not run the shop often were prone to making.
She took out all five or six kinds of canned goods and arranged them by batch order.

Each cabinet had ten shelves. If she stocked only cans, each shelf could hold forty tins.

At the moment, they still had forty-six tins of canned tomatoes left.

Daisy checked them over. The canned goods their family had purchased all came from a canning company called Jarvot Foods.

A white paper label printed with the red, florid lettering of Jarvot Brothers was pasted onto each tinplate can, and the manufacturer’s address was affixed to the bottom.

It came from Building A30, Baker Street, St. Pancras Parish, London.

In other words, north London, not far from King’s Cross Station.

She took out the purchase invoice and found that the wholesale price for the canned tomatoes was three pence each, with a minimum order of forty tins.

The price listed on the order sheet was five pence a tin, or two tins for nine pence.

Lisa did have some business sense. Whenever she drew in customers, she always told them that buying two tins was a better deal than buying one.

One pound was twenty shillings, and one shilling was twelve pence.

Once this batch of canned goods sold out, they could make at least sixty-nine pence in profit.

She continued taking stock and discovered that fast-moving items like soap, matches, sealing wax, and soda powder were all gone.

The corners of her mouth tightened. At last, she was somewhat unable to bear it any longer.

Still, when she thought of the harsh, busy rhythm of life this family kept, and how Lisa had fallen ill, leaving no one able to properly look after the shop…

If they asked Mary to do it, she could not read a single word. She was good at watching children and cooking, and now she also had to take care of Lisa. The fact that she could mind the shop at all was already good enough.

Daisy spent half an hour making a simple pass through the shelves.

There were far fewer varieties of goods in the nineteenth century than there had been in her previous life.

For her, even memorizing the stock of every item was no difficult task.

Now that she had a basic grasp of the shop’s situation, Daisy planned to go out and restock.

While she was at it, she could also get a sense of the customers nearby and the other competitors.

Before leaving, she tucked two burlap sacks from behind the counter under her arm, then called Mary out to watch the door and sell goods.

Only then did she head out with the old man, following the narrow alley southward.

The south exit of Clark Street led to Jude Road, while the north exit led to Dorothy Street.

Their destination was Whitechapel Road, which meant they had to go through the south exit.

It was only half a mile in a straight line to Whitechapel Road, but in the snow, with all the twists and turns, it would take half an hour to walk.

As for Spitalfields Market and Petticoat Lane, where Lisa usually went to buy stock…

They were located near Albans Street and connected to Whitechapel Road.

That whole area counted as the liveliest part of the East End.

Based on the original body’s instinctive aversion to the place, Daisy could tell that “lively” was not exactly a compliment here.

But if one wanted cheap goods, goods far below market price, one had to come to this area.

Land was cheap in East End, London, so all the tobacco, liquor, and tea wholesalers, as well as factory distributors, gathered here.

Although railways stretched across the entire country in this era, and London already had an underground railway, there were still very few stations open.

She could not enjoy that convenience yet. She still had to walk.

Daisy followed the old man south. As soon as they walked out of the south exit of Clark Alley, she saw a grocery store far larger than her own.

In truth, most of the houses inside Clark Alley, where Daisy lived, were just like hers.

Narrow, small, and low, with gray brick walls, peeling wooden doors and windows, dilapidated roof tiles, and no sense of design or period style to speak of.

There was no such thing as fashion in poor people’s houses. From the eighteenth century to now, they had hardly changed at all.

Every house was either used for business while squeezing in an entire family,

or rented out in parts, with three or four households packed into a single building.

When they reached the junction with the main street, she stood at the narrow entrance and looked toward the corner.

Piero’s Grocery stood out from this gray, shabby street corner like a crane among chickens.

The shop occupied an entire detached building and had a broad glass display window.

Its clean red-brick walls, classically styled beige doorposts and porch, and the fresh pine branches hanging at the entrance all looked bright and tidy.

Sunlight poured in from the front. Young women in cotton bustle dresses went in and out of the doorway. Even this early in the morning, business was already booming.