PC is Profitable

PC is Profitable.

Those were my senior's words.

Honestly, I couldn't make sense of them.

Not that he's ever done anything that made sense in the first place.

It was absurd. I wanted to ask if he'd eaten something wrong as a kid. But looking back after enough time has passed, it always clicks — why he made that call when he did.

Click, clack!

Normally I would have grilled him with questions. Then I realized there was no point.

Because history doesn't repeat itself.

The exact same situation never happens twice. Memorizing it like a textbook won't help you in a live fight. I decided to figure it out myself. Even if I asked him, it would only be after I'd done everything I could on my own.

The company my senior wanted to buy. He'd said it was going public, and sure enough, I found it among the approved IPO listings.

Revenue looks fine, net profit isn't in the red… Not a company that's about to collapse overnight.

Sora knew how to read a financial statement. It wasn't for nothing that she'd carried herself with confidence since her freshman year.

Click, clack!

But stock analysis ran much deeper than that. You had to grasp the actual business in concrete detail.

An online shopping mall. Honestly, she'd expected nothing special. Just buy inventory wholesale and flip it. Anyone could run a business like that.

Surprisingly, it had a competitive edge — a reason for customers to actually visit.

A plus-size specialty mall? Ah… well, I've struggled with sizing myself.

Women's clothing was complicated. Sizes were more varied than men's, and plenty of people were picky about fabric. She was one of them. Underwear especially was a nightmare. Korean brands never had her size. You had to buy foreign labels — expensive, and finding a material that actually fit was a whole separate ordeal.

Do they even carry 70H? Maybe I should grab a matching set while I'm at it.

If a mall specialized in exactly that, you could buy good product at a far more reasonable price. There had to be customers out there with the same problem. She felt like she'd just discovered the company's real value —

110H?! That's not a chest — that's just fat.

It didn't match the business direction she'd imagined. Plus-size, sure, but geared toward people with a rather specific body type. No — this was the mainstream. Korea's obese population was growing by the day. 09Lady was a shopping mall built for them.

Are there really that many people built like this? I barely see any around me.

It was baffling to Sora. But a company's financial statements weren't allowed to lie — and for an IPO, they'd be even more precise. Still, she couldn't bring herself to believe it.

Gulp.

She had no choice but to ask for help.

"Why does a mall like this do so well?"

A fair question. She'd clearly done her basic homework before coming.

"I just can't ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠figure it out…"

"Of course you can't."

"Excuse me?"

But she wouldn't have found any real answers. Of course not — this had nothing to do with Sora. Pretty face. Tiny waist. A body built like a sex machine.

"Though, to be fair, your chest is pretty fat."

"You fucking bastard."

"But your mind isn't fat, is it?"

"?"

A plus-size shopping mall. They sold regular sizes too, but the brand identity was marketed that way.

The mall itself has no real competitive edge.

Even much larger e-commerce platforms were in the same boat. When online shopping first took off, Auction ruled the market. A few years later it was 11st. These days, saying people use rocket delivery was so obvious it barely needed saying.

"Plain retail is doomed to get crushed by competitors unless you've got economies of scale."

"So then 09Lady is also…"

"That one's a little special."

Consumers were hardwired to hunt for cheap goods. To keep customers from defecting, you had to keep undercutting. But a small mall could still lock in a loyal customer base. It was a common model overseas — people buying from companies that sponsored anti-racism, environmental causes, and so on.

Why are foreign companies so obsessed with being PC?

There were reasons for it, and business motives behind those reasons.

"These days they call it ESG management. Fancy upgraded vocabulary."

"So 09Lady is one of those ESG companies?"

"Hmm."

A slightly different flavor of PC. Unlike anti-racism or environmental protection, it didn't actually help society at large. But it had still secured a loyal customer base. Revenue climbed every year. In other words, if you could keep growing that loyalty, you had a competitive advantage.

"The PC campaigns I joined were sponsored by them, too."

"Ah…"

"Getting it now?"

"Still, doesn't that leave the fundamental limit of being retail instead of manufacturing?"

Sora fired off a fairly sharp question. Maybe nutrients were reaching her brain and not just her chest.

If she'd been an A-cup, she might've surpassed me.

She had a point. Buying from a PC company meant contributing to a PC company's revenue. But retail was just margin. The actual manufacturer might have nothing to do with PC — or even be anti-PC. Think about it rationally and that was the conclusion. Anyone who sat down and reasoned it out calmly would land in the same place.

But not everyone did.

Especially women's online communities — perfect places to manufacture public opinion.

"Where is this?"

"You don't know?"

"No, first time hearing of it."

"You're not just pretending you don't use it while secretly lurking, right?"

"?"

There were people like that. Women's communities were the worst communities on earth.

Simply put, a space where everyone becomes an idiot.

Even the Korean Stock Gallery wasn't normal. Lunatics posted garbage every single day. But at least you could exchange opinions. The scariest thing about women's communities was that individual opinions simply did not exist.

"Is that even possible?"

"You're not totally clueless about internet memes, right?"

"Well, a little."

"Have you ever seen an internet meme that actually came out of a women's community?"

Internet memes weren't kids' games anymore. They showed up in variety shows and dramas, and sometimes became full-blown social phenomena. Things like "solo-dining parasite" or "Changryeol-tier ripoff." In an era when memes could drive trends, the irony was that virtually nothing originated from women's communities.

"Weird, right? Are women mentally inferior to men or something?"

"That is genuinely a discriminatory statement!"

"Exactly. There's no way that's true."

It was the peculiar nature of women's community sites. Closed off, exclusionary, and always demanding you fall in line with the group's opinion.

In a word, a communist society.

Were ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠North Koreans poorer than South Koreans because they were inferior people? Obviously it was the regime. The same phenomenon existed on the internet. You could experience secondhand exactly why communism was a problem.

"Looks like the model lost the battle with her diet a little."

"Right?"

"Why are all the comments nothing but praise?"

"Roughly the same as praising the Kim family dynasty."

In North Korean eyes, he was a majestic and dignified General. The gaze of a women's community worked the same way.

Individuals probably think differently.

What the hell, that fat bitch lol

But the control was so thorough you couldn't say it out loud. Spend months or years in a community like that and your brain rotted. You lost the ability to think for yourself.

"If you pump a stock on a site like that, how well do you think it lands?"

"You wrote this, didn't you, senior?"

"How'd you know?"

"There's an edit mark."

The most dangerous thing for an investor. Even without him, news about 09Lady was already everywhere.

I even did PC activism just to pull this off — might as well squeeze every last drop of value out of it.

In the real world, the MeToo movement got mixed looks at best. But here, it was righteous activism. 09Lady stood on the front lines of it — perceived as an innovative company changing the world(?).

"Is everyone insane? If you just thought about it a little more rationally…"

"Yeah. The day they invent a hypnosis app can't be far off."

"What?"

If one ever got developed, she'd be the first test subject. Even so, Sora still couldn't quite grasp it — the mindset of people who did PC activism. For them, it wasn't that something was right. It was that it had to be right.