A Modest Flex
"Ah. We're already here."
I'd nodded off for a while. I stretched, working the stiffness out of my shoulders, and got to my feet.
Staring at a screen on a moving bus — no wonder I got sick and passed out.
It wasn't even a computer. Just the little window of my phone, and I'd been locked on it the whole way. The nausea had kept creeping back.
Let's see what I made this time.
About fifty-three million won...
It felt oddly thin. All that motion sickness, and I'd only scraped together roughly a year's salary? If I'd been at a real computer I could have made far more.
Take out what's locked in the short and I've barely got twenty million in cash left to scalp with. Day-trading on a phone is miserable anyway. Nothing to be done.
The moment I stepped off the bus, cold wind slapped my face and drove the last of the nausea out in a single breath.
God, it's freezing. Colder every day.
Everyone joked that Daegu was hot — Daefrica, they called it, as if the city were a patch of Africa — but I ran cold, and to me the difference had never amounted to much.
...Walk out like this and I'll catch a cold.
I stopped short. My feet, already carrying me out of the transfer center, halted on their own. I looked down at what I was wearing.
...This puffer's been on my back a long time.
I'd bought the long down coat back during the Pyeongchang Olympics craze, three years ago or so, and I'd been too attached to it to replace the thing. I'd worn the same one ever since.
Can't even wear a long coat on site...
I'd already been feeling the need for a short puffer. A long one was a liability on a construction site — the hem caught, and that could get dangerous — and it made me look slow besides. Too cheap to buy my own, I'd been trudging around in nothing but the fluorescent padding the company issued, and the site was brutally cold.
Right. I'll buy a new one.
A transfer terminal meant a department store was attached, didn't it? I turned and headed the other way.
"Haa... Not a single real customer again today."
Kim Yoon-nyeong, twenty-seven and a sales associate at the Moncler boutique in the luxury hall of Shinsegae Department Store, let out another sigh thick with worry.
Why does everyone just window-shop and leave?
Strangely enough, from the day she had started, the store's sales had begun to slide.
Keep this up and I'm going to get fired...
She had graduated from a fashion program, ridden an elite track, and landed in a department-store luxury boutique while she was still young. At first she had been nothing but sure of herself.
With this face and this mouth, aunties and uncles don't stand a chance. I'll have them wrapped around my finger with room to spare.
A face that was cute and neat at once, an easy sunny manner, and a sales patter she had actually practiced. She had passed the interview in a single round, and her confidence had overflowed.
Right up until she met the real thing.
"Mind if I try this on?"
"Of course! For an atmosphere like yours, this design over here would be even more..."
A customer came in. She stayed close and pitched the goods. Talk up only the strengths, stroke their mood just enough, and coaxing a wallet into the open was easy.
But.
"This is nice. The price is... hiss."
"I'll... I'll come back next time!"
At first she had told herself it was only natural. A luxury puffer was expensive, after all. Then the same scene repeated, over and over, and even Yoon-nyeong wore down.
"I'll look around somewhere else and come back!"
"Ugh, now that I look again, it doesn't suit me as well as I thought."
"Do you do seventy-two-month installments?"
Those customers were the gentle ones. There was the ajumma who tried things on however she pleased and smeared her makeup all over the merchandise. The grandmother who made for the exit still wearing a coat she hadn't paid for. The couple in their early twenties who tried on the premium line, snapped a couple's photo for proof, then hung everything back up and left. The store had villains of every variety.
"Yoon-nyeong, with window-shoppers like that you have to know how to cut them off before they damage the product."
"I'm sorry..."
Her standing at work slid downhill right alongside the sales, and she could no longer remember the last time she had so much as touched an incentive.
Still. The next customer — I'm selling them a puffer. I have to.
She was in the middle of that vow when, right on cue, a man in a black long puffer walked in.
"Welcome to Moncler. Please, browse at your leisure!"
The greeting came out half on autopilot. From the moment he stepped through the door, though, Yoon-nyeong had already finished scanning him, and she had already decided: another window-shopper.
A Pyeongchang puffer? From when? It's completely worn out... One look and he's not buying a thing.
The coat hung limp, thick with dust, torn from years of neglect. The man himself was handsome, but the whole of him had that same wilted, shabby air.
...If it's the sort of puffer older men usually ask for... the budget line, right?
A true professional, though, had to be able to sell even to a customer who looked impossible to sell to. Yoon-nyeong approached him with a suitably modest price in mind.
"Sir, is there a particular design you're looking for?"
"Ah... I was just going to look around on my own."
There was a type like this. The ones who found a clerk's attention burdensome, who got shy. Push a hard sell on them and it backfired.
Ease him toward the budget line, natural as anything — and make him buy.
Contrary to every intention she had, the man circled the floor once, drifted toward the premium line, and picked up the most expensive puffer in the store, turning it over in his hands.
"You have an eye, sir. That's from the premium line — a different class entirely, starting with the fill. Among the finest goose down, the very finest..."
Yoon-nyeong latched on at once and walked him through the piece as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Call it premium so he registers that it's expensive. Then put something cheaper in front of him, and the odds of a sale go up.
It was her own little tactic, meant to head off that mutually embarrassing moment when a customer saw the price and set the thing back down.
Before she could so much as extend an arm to push the cheaper piece, the man spoke first.
"Mind if I try this on?"
"Of course you may! I'll take your coat, sir."
She answered with a smiling face. Her thoughts were something else.
Great. Another one who's going to try it on and leave.
Customers who went as far as trying something on were, more often than not, pleased — and then they checked the price, set it down, and walked out. She had seen it more times than she could count.
"...Wow, it suits you so well, sir! The fit is exactly as if it were made for you!"
"...You think so? It is warm. And it looks nice."
She had not expected him to buy it, not even a little, and yet the moment she opened her mouth the compliments poured out without a pause. And no wonder — the fit on him really was that good.
...Put it on him and he doesn't even need a model.
Long legs, real height, and broad shoulders underneath it all. The fit was dead right.
"Sir, it looks wonderful on you! It sits perfectly with the line of your trousers... This piece was made for you, truly!"
Not that you're going to buy it!
The thought and the words didn't match — but hadn't she meant it, when she said it truly suited him? And then the man said something that shattered her prediction completely.
"Is that so? Then I'll take this one."
"Pardon?"
For a second she was so thrown she couldn't get a word out. Seeing it, the man went on.
"Ah — would it be all right if I wore it out?"
"...Yes, sir. The price is 5.3 million won. How would you like to pay?"
"In full, please. One payment."
As he said it, he held out a black card.
One payment. In full.
Even the reasonably rich defaulted to installments when they bought something this expensive. The influencers who occasionally walked out with a pricey piece always swiped it onto a plan and sorted the rest out later. The man in front of her had just put the whole thing on the card at once, like cash.
She watched him slot the card into the terminal with complete indifference, stole a glance at the black plastic, and thought:
Is this that black card rich people are supposed to carry? The one I've only ever heard about?
"Thank you, sir. Your points..."
"I don't have points. It's fine. Thank you for your trouble."
"Yes! Thank you so much, sir! Get home safely!"
He wasn't even earning points. Which meant he wasn't one of the store's established VIP regulars either — and a premium-line purchase went straight onto the storewide VIP list, so she would have known.
"God. Insane. How much money do you have to have, to wander in like you're just out for a stroll and buy a luxury puffer without blinking?"
At first his walk had looked only shabby. Seeing him leave in the luxury puffer, it looked different. Handsome, well-built, and rich on top of it — a life so unlike her own it barely seemed to belong to the same world.
"What kind of life is that man even living...? I'm jealous."
And so the storm of a VIP was gone, ten minutes after he had walked in.
"Expensive really is better. No question."
I tucked the black Coupang card — the one I used for purchases — back inside my coat and turned the thought over.
Outside, the cold wind was still knifing through. Inside the puffer it wasn't merely warm. It was comfortable.
Unreal. This is way warmer than the long coat.
Honestly, I had gasped when I saw the price. I'd even hesitated, for a second, over putting it back. I'd bought it to wear to work, and part of me had wondered if it was too much.
But.
It's not even a tenth of what I made today. So what.
The money I earned moved my fingers for me.
The feeling, though. That's good.
Buying something I never would have bought on an ordinary day — that alone made me feel that something in me had changed, and the feeling came on warm.
Time I headed home.
I was making for the subway when it happened.
A murmur. A rustle of voices.
Everyone had started looking the same way.