Bad Booze, Booming Business
"Irasshaimase!"
"It's Suntory!"
"This wasn't Suntory?"
Chaos. Absolute chaos over a situation no one saw coming.
They had bought the liquor from Namdaemun. Every bottle had clearly been stamped with the Suntory label.
Suntory XO
Suntory VSOP
Suntory Royal
Suntory ???
The taste was nothing like what they had imagined. And not in a good way.
"The customers keep saying the highballs taste weird…"
"We think they're weird too!"
"Is this even real Suntory?"
The customers' complaints made perfect sense to Yu-jun. Even after tasting it himself, he couldn't bring himself to call it good.
They ran their mouths about how it was rare, aged liquor!
The shop owner had said so. At the time, Yu-jun had been thrilled to score good booze so cheap.
"It goes for about forty thousand won at the big marts, right? We'll do thirty-five… no, thirty-two thousand for you! Enjoy it, kids, heh heh."
They had even knocked the price down because they were students. Paying in cash had felt a little off, but—
That's just how traditional markets work.
He had told himself that was why it was so cheap. Looking back, even that had been part of the sales pitch. Acting like they were giving a bargain while unloading garbage. The suspicion was impossible to shake.
"I've seen this one! Ji-hye sent me a photo!"
"They bought some too?"
"At least bottles that look like this might be the real deal… Let's just sell these."
The doubt only grew. They cracked open a bottle that supposedly tasted decent—
What is that smell?
Something was off. Whiskey had its own character, sure, but this was too straightforwardly foul.
"What the hell is this?"
"Looks like another dud."
"You said this one was definitely good!"
He wasn't the only one thinking it. Same brand, completely different taste. No one could explain why.
"What's in this ceramic one?"
"I bought it because it looked pretty."
"Ptooey! It reeks of metal!"
There were bizarre bottles too—pretty ceramics filled with liquid that could only be described as wrong.
Insane!
When they bought them, they had simply believed the "old and precious" sales talk. No one expected this many duds. Out of more than ten cases, the usable bottles didn't even make ten percent.
"What do we do? We can't even sell this stuff."
"What do you mean, what do we do?! We go get a damn refund right now!!"
Rage hit the ceiling. Yu-jun piled into the car with the club members and tore off toward Namdaemun. They were going to tear the guy a new one and get every last bottle of this rip-off booze refunded.
"It was a cash deal, so there's no receipt. How are we supposed to process a refund, customer~?"
The owner greeted them with the warmest smile imaginable—one hundred and eighty degrees from the morning's face.
"No, we bought it here, so…"
"And how exactly are you going to prove that?"
"We bought it here! You sold it to us!!"
Sleazy. A snake-crawling-up-your-spine kind of unpleasant. If they had known he was this kind of person, they never would have bought a single bottle.
This bastard thinks we're suckers…
Regret came too late. The money was already paid. These people weren't going to listen to a word.
"I mean, maybe you did…"
"You know we did!"
"Why are you raising your voice, customer~? We simply can't tell whether the liquor you brought is the liquor we sold. Show us a receipt or something."
"We didn't get a receipt!!"
This wasn't their first rodeo. They had planned for exactly this situation before the sale even happened.
Thanks to these idiots, we cleared out all the dead stock. Heh heh.
They had landed the perfect marks. Unloading the bad bottles rotting in the warehouse onto suckers like these. The ones who got played were the ones at fault. If the kids were still too young to understand how the world worked, a little education would fix that.
"What's going on!"
"Someone causing trouble?"
"Got some nerve, pulling shit around here."
Merchants from the neighboring shops drifted over. Guys who had been hauling goods stopped one by one.
Uh… uh?
Yu-jun and his group froze. Being three adult men meant nothing here. The look in these men's eyes was nothing like ordinary people. A kind of fear he had never felt even from the toughest school thugs settled over them.
Gulp.
Angel Island flashed through his mind. In a cramped underground market like this, anything could happen and never leak outside.
Thud. Thud.
The owner of Brother Trading approached the tense group, smiling as he made it clear the positions had reversed.
"Customer. Wanna get hit?"
That place was a dungeon.
Business was booming.
"Irasshaimase!"
"Whoa, an izakaya!"
"I saw it on SNS—they say that place is a must-try."
It was going so well it was almost a problem. Even more customers than yesterday's already solid crowd were pouring in.
Fame had done its work. They were trending on SNS. Last year's booth was pulling another stunt.
That kind of attention comes with pressure, though.
When the first installment hits big, the sequel usually collapses under the weight of expectations. Meeting those expectations was never easy. But if you pulled it off, the boom got even bigger.
Second-wave spillover. Once it trended, influencers flocked in. YouTubers, bloggers, Twitter addicts did the free promotion for them.
Yeah. It tastes good.
Taste reviews were scoring high too. The MSG burned into brains since childhood was something the mind simply couldn't refuse. More and more people showed up after seeing it on SNS. A virtuous cycle, and the booth thrived.
"Still not as packed as last year, though."
"That was my sincere steak."
"And now?"
"Money."
It came down to the menu. Some customers took food to go, but most waited for a table. Nobody wanted to eat ramen standing up. Compared to cube steak, the turnover rate was inevitably slower.
What you lose in one place, you gain in another.
Business wasn't just about how many portions you sold.
Hye-ri came running over with a startled look on her face.
"Oppa!"
"Hm?"
"I finished the Day One settlement last night."
"And?"
"The numbers are a little… weird."
Sales. Most university festival booths, not just at Hankuk University, barely broke even.
You're lucky if you just avoid going into the red.
Free labor was the only reason they kept rolling. What they were seeing now was rare for a campus festival.
"Day One net profit alone cleared ten million won."
"Mm."
"I feel like last year's revenue was actually higher."
"Operating margin was better this time."
Margins were running seventy to eighty percent. No taxes, no labor costs—pure net profit.
All thanks to running a premium operation.
The izakaya image. Customers happily paid more. Sell the same volume, keep more of it. In food, margin was everything.
"It almost feels fun, like reading a financial statement."
"A restaurant is a company too."
"Oh."
"A Gangnam galbi house probably posts better operating profit than half the junk stocks on KOSDAQ."
"That's a little much."
It applied to real companies as well. Just like Sora said, you always had to check the financials. Operating profit margin. Buy something just because it posted trillions in revenue and you could get bloodied.
One little swing in raw material prices and the whole thing shatters.
Selling a lot mattered, but how much you kept mattered more. This was a chance to feel that firsthand.
"You can't keep this much in a real business."
"Obviously. Labor costs and everything…"
"Which is why you have to break as many rules as possible and carve out every hole the money can come through."
"Hey."
Reality worked the same way. Two sides of the same coin. The restaurant business didn't make its money only on the face people saw.
No matter how much people deny it.
That reverse side existed. Fail to grasp it and you never saw a company's true shape. This had probably been a useful lesson—for Sora, for the club members.
"We've got nothing left!"
"Ah, for real…"
"We busted our asses for nothing because of someone."
"I bought the liquor by myself?!"
Not every club was so lucky. The neighboring booth had botched inventory management and a fight had broken out.
Their operating margins were already paper-thin.
Seafood pancakes. Sell them for five thousand won and you barely clear anything. They scraped by on the liquor sales. Losing that lifeblood money by accident? The club members' hollow faces made perfect sense.
"They were our strongest competition, too."
"The place next door always looks like the rival."
"Now even more people are going to flood us. You know that means more filming, right?"
More bodies piled into their booth. And that brought a small side effect.
Gyo-iku-sang.
Tomorrow. Day Three. Broadcast cameras were coming. The host was someone they had a somewhat sour history with last year. They could ignore it and move on. That was the thought—but from the network's perspective, there wasn't really anywhere else worth shooting.
"You gonna hit him with another one like last time?"
"Nope."
"Then what?"
"We use him."
"?"
The best way to elevate yourself was to elevate the other guy first.