Burger Landing (5)
Sojin seemed to catch on after hearing Trish's introduction and asked me, "Ah! Is your last name O'Connor?"
"Yeah. Trish is Sean O'Connor's younger sister, the founder of O'Connor Burger."
"Wow!"
Needless to say, everyone else was shocked too.
As if she had just realized something important, Sena blurted out, "Oh! So that’s why you were able to walk right in without waiting in line. Because you're close to the owner's sister!"
"Well... you could say that."
I was close with the owner too, of course.
"Then you can get us in this time too, right? Right?"
I let out a sigh. "It's not impossible, but..."
What was she doing, bothering her brother over something this trivial?
I pointed at the people standing in line. "Isn't waiting like everyone else and then eating part of the fun?"
"Nope. Not fun at all. I just want to eat now."
My little sister had no patience whatsoever.
Still, it wasn't exactly a difficult request.
Who on earth had brought O'Connor Burger to Korea in the first place?
One word from me, and it was a free pass.
"So you're asking me to get you in?"
"Yeah. Do it! Hurry up and do it!"
But it wasn't healthy to give in so easily.
If I indulged every request, she'd only get worse. Not that I thought it was possible for her to get much worse than she already was.
I straightened my back and lifted my chin. "If you need your brother's help, how about asking a little more earnestly?"
Sena pouted. "Tch. What's that supposed to mean?"
"Don't want to? Fine, I'll leave."
The moment I turned as if to walk away, Sena hurriedly grabbed my arm.
"W-what do you want? You want me to show you some aegyo?"
"Oh! Aegyo sounds good."
This was my chance to see my little sister's cute act in full force.
Sena put on a serious face. "So you really want to see Han Sena's ultimate aegyo, huh?"
Ultimate aegyo? What was that supposed to be?
"Go ahead."
Come to think of it, she had been pretty good at acting cute when she was little. Once she'd grown up, though, she'd stopped being cute altogether and had only gotten irritating.
Sena took a deep breath, brought both hands up to her chest, and twisted her face into what she must have thought was the cutest expression imaginable before speaking in a ridiculous baby voice.
"Big bro, I wanna eat a chee-burger. A chee-burger! Ah, hurry up and get me a chee-burger!"
...
I went completely blank.
What in the world had I just witnessed?
Apparently she wasn't done, because Sena's "aegyo" kept going.
"You know I really love cheese, right? Mine gets two slices! Aah, hurry, big bro."
All eyes around us swung toward us at once.
I thought I even heard a man's voice from somewhere mutter, "What the hell is wrong with her?" Was he the kind of guy who just said exactly what he was thinking?
Before I knew it, I'd shouted, "Enough!"
Sena blinked in surprise. "Big bro, are you yelling at me? Sena's hurt. Hmph!"
...
Watching my sister stand there with her arms crossed, cheeks puffed out in a sulk, I felt something hot and terrible boiling up inside my chest.
I couldn't even tell whether I was furious or about to throw up.
Can I hit her?
Wouldn't I be legally innocent if I did?
Unable to watch any longer, Sojin stepped in to stop her.
"P-please stop, Sena."
The others chimed in as well.
"I think it backfired."
"Keep going and you might get scolded."
But Sena ignored them and doubled down on the act.
"Big bro, buy Sena a chee-burger."
"Stop!"
Please, stop.
This was so embarrassing I could barely stand it.
"What? You said you wanted to see aegyo. Chee-..."
I reached out and clamped a hand over Sena's mouth.
"No, that's enough. I've seen plenty. Let's go inside."
"Really?"
If she kept going any longer, one of the Han siblings might die of embarrassment right there on the spot.
Now I understood why the word ultimate had been attached to aegyo.
What exactly had I done to deserve seeing something like that? The shame and self-loathing were almost too much to bear.
Unlike me, who was still trying to recover from the mental damage, Sena bounced up and down while holding her friends' hands.
"Waaah!"
Watching her get this excited over a single hamburger made her seem even younger than she already was.
I gave up the seats I'd reserved for the time being and handed them over to Sena and her friends.
O'Connor Burger didn't normally take reservations, but I had a special pass.
Still not fully recovered from the shock, I heard Trish say with a smile, "Miru really is a good older brother."
"I think so too."
If I hadn't hit my sister after seeing that performance, I supposed I really did deserve to be called a good brother. At this rate, maybe I should have gotten an award from the World Big Brother League.
"Your sister is so adorable."
"...Her?"
At this point, wasn't she less a sister than an enemy?
As she was speaking, Trish suddenly looked like something had occurred to her and asked, "By the way, what exactly is this chee-burger thing you've been talking about? O'Connor Burger doesn't have a menu item like that."
Uh... how was I supposed to explain that? If I told her it was just a burger with cheese, would she even understand?
Han Miru bought burgers for his sister and her friends before taking his leave.
Han Sena and her friends sat down at the table and ate their hamburgers, all of them marveling at the absurdity of the moment.
"I can't believe we're eating O'Connor Burger in Korea."
"Seriously. A familiar taste really is the most dangerous thing."
"Yeah. This is exactly the flavor."
"Since oppa ordered extra so we could take home whatever was left, I guess we can each bring back two."
Right now, O'Connor Burger was practically a rare item you couldn't even buy with money.
If they brought it home, their family would be thrilled.
"I didn't even get to thank him properly earlier."
"Make sure you tell Miru oppa thank you for me."
"I think the line got even longer than before. If we'd waited, we would've been in real trouble."
Han Sena bit into her hamburger with her small mouth and thought, Next time I want something, I should just act cute in front of my brother.
The four of them ate fries and drank orange juice.
"Wasn't the woman who came with Miru oppa super pretty?"
"Totally. Tall, curvy, and definitely a Western beauty."
"Her glasses suited her so well too. She looked really smart."
Well, being Western, she definitely had a different kind of charm from Korean women.
And it wasn't just her looks—she was a reporter for a major American media outlet, and her brother was the owner of O'Connor Burger.
Jo Yu-gyeong asked, "You said the older sister you saw in Hongdae with Sojin was gorgeous too, right?"
"Yeah. She used to be a colleague at my brother's securities firm, I think. Wasn't her name Seong Yun-ah?"
"And she knows the singer Jiyu too, right?"
"Yeah. They seemed pretty close."
Park Ye-jin clicked her tongue. "Miru oppa really is surrounded by pretty people."
"Come to think of it... maybe our brother's popular with women?"
At Sena's words, Jo Yu-gyeong nodded.
"Of course he is. Miru oppa has money, he's kind, and he's handsome. Of course there'd be a lot of women around him. Right, Sojin?"
"Mm-hmm."
Jung Sojin nearly cried to herself.
Tsk! If I'd known I'd get to see oppa today, I would've dressed up nicely before coming.
Shinsegi Group.
The conglomerate had been founded by Yoo Hye-kyung, the youngest daughter of the late Chairman Yoo Myeonghun of Yooseong Group.
After handing his subsidiaries over to his children, Chairman Yoo had suggested that his youngest daughter try her hand at retail and supported her venture.
When Yoo Hye-kyung first announced that she was going into retail, a great many people looked on with concern.
She had been raised so carefully—did she really have the ability to run a company?
That was when Yoo Hye-kyung made a remarkable choice.
She adopted a professional management system.
She was the chairwoman in name only. All actual operations were entrusted to the vice chairman she had hired as a professional manager.
In cases like that, it was common for the owner to meddle in every little thing despite knowing nothing about the business. But she truly did leave everything alone and handed over full authority. In return, she made sure the people in charge were rewarded properly for their work.
With Yooseong Group's support added on top of that, Shinsegi Group grew quickly. Before long, it had risen to compete with the retail giants in department stores, supermarkets, shopping malls, duty-free shops, and franchises alike.
Although Yoo Hye-kyung had never managed the company directly herself, she had made sure her children received proper succession training.
By now, her eldest son, Min Gijin, was serving as an executive director, while her eldest daughter, Min Ye-jin, was working as a managing director.
When Min Ye-jin came to her older brother's office and sipped her tea, she said, "O'Connor Burger is insanely popular."
Min Gijin let out a sigh. "We should've gotten it ourselves. I can't believe Hwaan beat us to it."
"I guess that means Heo Min-woong got a boost out of it. Thanks to this, his footing inside Hwaan Group seems even stronger."
Given how popular O'Connor Burger already was in the United States, its success had been all but guaranteed.
Min Gijin had spotted its potential early and personally gone to O'Connor Burger's headquarters to meet the founders and other key people, trying to persuade them.
He had good reason for working so hard.
Shinsegi Group might have been a powerhouse in retail, but that was old news now. The center of gravity had already shifted online.
Coupang, a company that had been founded less than ten years ago, was already bigger than every other Korean retailer combined.
People ordered their goods from online shopping malls instead of going out in person, and sales at supermarkets and malls kept shrinking day by day.
Department stores were the only ones barely managing to hold their revenue steady, thanks to luxury goods.
The problem was that this left department stores with no choice but to cater to luxury brands' every whim.
Luxury brands demanded not only low commissions and lavish store interiors, but even staff dispatch as a condition for opening a branch.
Under those circumstances, retail companies had been forced to devise all kinds of ways to survive.
The most important thing in offline retail was simple: bring the customers in.
And what was the best way to do that?
Famous restaurants.
Even people who bought all their clothes and cosmetics online would still travel to a famous hole-in-the-wall restaurant and wait in line for hours just to eat there.
That was why Min Gijin had worked hard to bring famous restaurants from all over the country into department stores and malls.
If he could secure the rights to O'Connor Burger and place it in department stores and shopping malls, what would happen?
People would flock there just to eat it, and that would lead directly to more foot traffic and higher sales. On top of that, they'd get a huge publicity boost.
But in the end, it had failed.
Min Ye-jin said in a slightly irritated voice, "If Ah-reum had really handled it properly, I think they would've signed with us. Was she actually trying to talk to them, or not?"
To make the deal happen, she had quietly asked her youngest sister for help.
Min Ah-reum was working with Continue Capital and was close not only with Han Miru but with Lee Dong-ho as well. If Ah-reum had stepped in actively, they almost certainly would have landed the contract.
"Who knows."
Min Gijin and Min Ye-jin were only a year apart, but there was more than twenty years between either of them and Min Ah-reum.
Because of that, the two of them had never once thought of Ah-reum as a rival.
So when their youngest sister said she was going to found a company called MFW with investment from Continue Capital, they couldn't help being stunned.
And for good reason—the investment amount was a staggering 1 trillion won.
Of that, Min Ah-reum held a 30 percent stake.
By simple calculation, that meant she had been handed 300 billion won for free.
When Min Gijin read through the business outline, he had been a little thrown off.
Investing in a new brand was one thing.
But metaverse? Games? Virtual humans? Fashion moving into games, brands being promoted through games, clothes being sold for avatars to wear?
There was no way something like that would work.
And yet it had.
They had even made aggressive use of virtual humans.
It took an enormous amount of time and money to make a single brand known.
But MFW had promoted brands in a way no one had ever thought of before, and the results had been spectacular.
It got to the point where companies like Nike and Vince were following MFW's lead, making promotional games in Block Valley and releasing virtual humans of their own.
The fashion companies MFW invested in saw their sales explode, and their names were constantly on people's lips.
MFW had become the most closely watched company in the fashion industry, and rumors were even circulating that its valuation would surpass 20 billion dollars.
That was a bigger number than Shinsegi Group's entire market capitalization.