Princess of the 19th Century Department Store - Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Daisy could see that the first floor of this shop was extremely spacious.

By her estimate, it was at least a dozen times larger than her family’s storefront, and its stock was both wide-ranging and complete.

Customers could browse and choose goods for themselves, and there was also a dedicated tobacco and liquor counter, with an entire display window filled with all kinds of alcohol.

At the moment, an employee was removing the protective wooden boards fitted outside the glass windows.

She shook her head and continued following Mr. Nash toward Albans Street.

At present, Clark Street had seventy to eighty buildings from south to north, stretching roughly two to three hundred meters in total.

More than two hundred households lived there, with a population somewhere between five and eight hundred.

Inside Clark Street were underground taverns, tailor shops, secondhand furniture stores, small cafés, and bakeries.

There were three grocery stores.

The south end of Clark Street led to Jude Road, and Piero’s Grocery stood at the corner.

In the middle of Clark Street was their family’s small Nash Grocery.

The northern exit of the street led to Dorothy Street, where there was also a Lobit Grocery.

The three stores all operated in different ways.

The Piero’s Grocery before her was the largest in scale.

Its operator, Piero, worked with an investor, and the two split the profits.

The investor behind him had bought the building but did not involve himself in running the business.

The shop’s renovation and operations had always been handled by Mr. Piero, who employed five or six clerks.

Mr. Piero himself did not live at the shop, either.

His family lived in a five-bedroom apartment near the Soho District, making him standard middle class.

Every day at six o’clock, Piero arrived at the shop right on time for work, and every evening at seven, he left right on time.

With an investor backing him, Piero’s stock was impressively lavish.

All sorts of wholesalers had always delivered goods to him on their own initiative.

As for Lobit Grocery on the corner by the north exit of Clark Street, it had long been a thorn in Lisa’s side.

Lobit Grocery was in slightly better shape than the Nash family grocery store.

The building was one floor taller, and the shopfront was twice as wide.

People lived on the third floor, while the second floor served as a warehouse and kitchen.

The first floor was the shop, and they had hired one employee.

Lobit’s wife also baked a bit of simple bread to sell.

Lisa did not resent Piero’s Grocery for doing well at all. She accepted it wholeheartedly.

After all, they were on a different level. Their tobacco and liquor alone were all good products she could not get her hands on.

But Lobit Grocery, like Nash Grocery, purchased its stock from Albans Street.

Ever since Lisa fell ill, that Mr. Lobit had been sending his clerk over to Nash Grocery every few days to ask around.

He even said that if Nash Grocery could no longer keep going, they could transfer their old stock to him to sell.

Business had been poor lately anyway, so an old woman like Lisa should stop worrying herself over it.

That had infuriated Lisa beyond words. She had leaned against the window and given the man a proper scolding, and only then had he stopped coming.

That was why she would rather hand the shop over to her family and let them make a mess of running it than close the doors for even a single day and give others a chance to laugh at her.

Along the way, Daisy discreetly asked Mr. Nash about the customer base of the two stores.

Their own shop made between three and eight pounds in profit each month.

That meant they still had at least several dozen, if not over a hundred, regular customers.

These people were all neighbors from the street, or patrons from the underground tavern across from their home.

When they were too lazy to go all the way to the mouth of the alley, they came here to buy things.

There were also some passing customers, pedestrians who took the shortcut past their door on the way to Jude Road or Dorothy Street.

Lobit Grocery, meanwhile, occupied the north exit of Clark Street and was close to Dorothy Street.

Dorothy Street was full of everyday bustle, with dozens upon dozens of cheap bakeries, cafés, taverns, small restaurants, candy shops, as well as two small grocery stores and mobile street vendors.

Because the food was inexpensive, thousands of workers ate on Dorothy Street every day.

Most of Lobit Grocery’s customers also came from this transient crowd.

As for Piero’s Grocery at the south exit, its customers were not these scattered passersby.

Jude Road was a broad road wide enough for four carriages to travel side by side, and Daisy and her grandfather were now walking slowly along it.

She looked around and finally felt she was truly seeing Victorian style for herself.

Along the main street stood rows of brown stone terraced houses, orderly in shape and solid in texture, with classical carved details, though most looked far too old and worn.

Painted carriages, freight wagons, hand-pulled carts, and even people riding unicycles passed along the road.

Whether they were workers by the roadside or gentlemen seated in carriages, every last person wore a three-piece suit and a felt hat.
Poor women wore plain dresses that made it easy to work, without the overly conspicuous bustle that stuck out like a chicken’s rump.

Women with a little more money to spare wore bustle dresses padded at the hips.

Most of the terraced houses on both sides of Jude Road were small workshops.

Button factories, shirt factories, pin factories, hatpin factories.

Of course, there were also charity schools, clinics, inns, two medium-sized restaurants, a police box, a coffin shop, a secondhand china store, and a coal shop.

In the little alleys connected to Jude Road, there were a few other grocery stores as well, though they were all small, about the same size as the Nash family shop.

According to the original owner’s memories, Piero’s Grocery supplied tobacco, liquor, and tea year-round to the two inns and two medium-sized restaurants on Jude Road.

It also supplied nearby factories with white paper, pens, ink, and all manner of office goods.

With a steady trade in higher-priced goods and plenty of walk-in customers on ordinary days, that grocery store could be said to be flourishing, looking down on every shop in this neighborhood.

Daisy thought it over.

Judging by the current state of her own shop, compared with a large store so close by, they had absolutely no competitive edge in customers, product variety, or pricing.

A large store had heavy foot traffic and ordered in large quantities. The larger the order, the cheaper the base price from the distributors.

A small shop with limited customers ordered less, paid higher wholesale prices, and earned much thinner profits.

If a large store so much as started a minor price war, a small shop could be crushed.

But if her family’s little shop continued to be managed as chaotically as it was now, there would be no need to compete with anyone. In another couple of days, it would collapse all on its own.

Daisy mulled it over. If it had been any other business, perhaps she could have let it go. But it just had to be retail.

No matter which life, no matter what era,

she could not accept watching a retail store that belonged to her family go out of business right under her nose.

Before long, Daisy and her grandfather arrived at Whitechapel Road.

They passed through the Whitechapel open-air market, squeezing their way through the crowded stream of people.

Vendors lined both sides of the road so tightly that not a drop of water could have passed through, shouting their wares at every passerby.

“Sir! How about a cigar? Only one penny.”

“Fish pudding, two pence a tin…”

“Perfume, miss? Rose scent… one shilling.”

After cutting through the street market, they reached the road behind it and headed toward Spitalfields.

Since the seventeenth century, the wholesalers here had mainly sold produce and dairy goods from farms.

Sixty or seventy years ago, Watt’s steam engines had taken over London, and railways had stretched from north to south.

Industry had developed rapidly, and every trade had advanced at startling speed.

Goods processed in factories had then become the mainstream products on this street.

Daisy took the purchasing list from her pocket and handed it to her grandfather.

Mr. Nash looked at the handwriting on it. It seemed a little different from Daisy’s usual writing, the strokes more elegant.

But he did not take it to heart. Instead, he noticed that the types of goods differed from their usual purchases.

“Liquor and cigars. Why aren’t we buying either of these?”

Mr. Nash remembered that they had very little stock of cigars left.

Daisy said bluntly, “I did the math.

Take cigars, for example. The purchase price here is usually five pence a box.

There are six cigars in a box, and we can only sell the box for six pence. The profit is one penny.”

Cheap tobacco had a market price. No poor person would buy cigars that cost more than three pence.

The purchase price was also extremely fixed. Unless it was smuggled mid-grade cigars, there was basically no room for negotiation.

“The environment in our shop isn’t suitable for storing cigars. They get damp easily.

That’s why the neighbors don’t like buying them from us. If we buy five boxes, it takes us a month to sell them.

And that only earns us five pence.”

“We might as well use that money to buy goods that sell quickly.

Tea leaves, soap, salt, powdered sugar, things like that.”

Mr. Nash understood what she meant, but he found the idea somewhat hard to grasp.

Businessmen like them all pursued a broad and complete range of goods.

Even if they had to grit their teeth, they still wanted more varieties of products in the shop.

There was no grocery store that did not sell tobacco and liquor.

But then he thought about it again. What his granddaughter said did seem right.

Given the actual situation in their shop, the profits from tobacco and liquor were meager, yet the purchase prices were not cheap, and they tied up money in stock.

If he set aside habit, then it did indeed seem like the right thing to do.