Beef Is Delicious
Thump, thump!
I felt as if I were heading to a company dinner for the first time in ages. Of course, I was still an elementary schooler, so calling it a company dinner was a bit of a stretch. Eating out, maybe—that was closer.
Maru had offered to treat us to delicious beef after school, partly as a way to get closer to my friends. So I brought Jiyu and Yumi along to a beef restaurant.
It looked outrageously expensive at a glance. From what I knew, the money for a single beef dinner could cover three or four pork dinners of the same size. Beef was that expensive in Korea.
Sizzle. On the iron griddle, the beef was browning to a rich gold, and Maru was grilling it with everything she had. Jiyu, Yumi, and I stared at the meat as it cooked, chopsticks in hand, fidgeting as if we couldn't bear to wait another second. I was no exception.
But meat had no choice but to cook with time, and beef wasn't the sort of thing you left on the heat for long. It tasted best at just the right doneness. A little more, and it turned tough, and half the pleasure of eating it was gone.
"It's done! Dig in, kids!"
Maru said it with the tongs still in her hand. Jiyu and Yumi fell on the beef with their chopsticks as if they had been waiting for this exact moment.
"Thank you for the beef, Hana's unnie!"
"Thank you for the meal!"
Since Maru was the one treating them, the kids offered their thanks first. In truth, it wasn't Maru paying at all, but the company. No matter how much money she had, she wasn't flush enough to cover beef for four. She was still a new hire—a downy little chick who had barely started working there.
"It's delicious!"
"This is why you eat beef!"
Jiyu and Yumi ate with thoroughly satisfied faces. I picked up a piece with my chopsticks and popped it into my mouth. It melted the instant it touched my tongue, sliding down my throat before I even had time to taste it properly. I could hardly believe meat this tender was allowed to exist.
"Eat more, Hana! I'll keep grilling until your stomach bursts today!"
Maru kept turning the meat with a supremely confident look, no doubt because she was holding a corporate card with no limit. If she'd had to pay for this out of her own pocket, I might have watched the color drain right out of her face. Of course, I had no intention of pushing things that far. Maru was an employee who took good care of me.
"Hana, what did you do over break?"
Yumi asked, plainly curious. Asking what everyone had been up to over a meal was only the natural thing. I gave her a vague answer. I could hardly tell her I'd gone to another world.
"I just played around! I didn't really do anything special over break."
It was true. I'd blinked once, and vacation was already over. I'd wanted to visit a cool pool or the sea in the summer, and it was a little disappointing that I never had. I turned the question back on her.
"What about you, Yumi? What did you do over break?"
Yumi answered while wrapping a ssam, a tidy bundle of meat and rice in a leaf.
"Jiyu and I went to an amusement park, and my family went to a valley too! In summer vacation, the best thing is playing somewhere cool."
As she said it, she passed the wrap to Maru. Maru was the one at the grill, so this was the proper thanks. Making ssam for the person doing the grilling was only right. They were putting in the work.
"Thanks, Yumi!"
Maru smiled and ate the wrap Yumi had made for her. Then Jiyu, sitting beside us, asked a question.
"Hana. I called because I wanted to hang out with you, but you didn't pick up. I asked unnie, and she said you went off to some place in the countryside? Where did you go?"
"Pfft—!"
I couldn't help spraying my water at that. While I'd been gone, the staff must have brushed it off by telling people I'd gone to the countryside. Well, I had vanished all of a sudden.
When I hesitated to answer, Maru hurried to change the subject.
"Come on, come on! There's still plenty of beef, so eat up! Should I order more drinks? One bottle of cola over here, please!"
Thanks to Maru's timely intervention, Jiyu didn't dig any further. I kept eating beef with cold sweat pouring down my back.
Kim Sehee had been playing happily with Hana, but when the time came she had no choice but to send her off. She wanted Hana all to herself, yet unfortunately Hana was not someone she could monopolize alone.
The moment Hana left, her head cooled. Feeling herself grow sharp again, Kim Sehee remembered the Walmart employees who had come earlier. Walmart—wasn't that the most successful distribution company in America? They might well have thought she had no manners at all.
Next to Walmart, Starlight Food was nothing but a small business. Not even that—closer to a supermarket. From employment and sales to headcount, the gap was probably more than a hundredfold. Playing with Hana had made her lose her head.
She called for James and Leila, who were looking around the company. This time she received them in a properly formal setting, doing everything she could so the two of them would not be displeased.
"I'm terribly sorry. An extremely urgent matter came up on the company's end..."
Kim Sehee said it with genuine apology. Seeing her take such a low posture, James fussed at once.
"Not a problem in the slightest! You created a miraculous hair-loss cure like this. Of course you'd be busy."
James had already tasted the effects of Tangle, and he looked so fanatical he might as well have been a Starlight Food employee himself. Leila shot him a look. Catching it, James cleared his throat and changed the subject.
"Touring the company and seeing the plants Starlight Food produces, I noticed so many of them have effects that can only be called miraculous."
Fortunately, since Kim Sehee spoke English, James was grateful that nothing would be lost or twisted in translation. In business like this, every single word mattered. No matter how native Leila's Korean was when she interpreted, she could not catch the subtext James carried.
"That's right. From cherry tomatoes to rice, grapes, and even coffee. It's fair to say they have the finest taste and quality. No—even if you searched the entire world, I doubt you'd find food that tastes like this."
Kim Sehee could say it with pride. She was certain that even the most celebrated products in the world would taste worse than what Starlight Food produced.
"Is that so? Truly remarkable."
James kept answering in a way that seemed to agree with her. Watching her superior, Leila decided the negotiation was going nowhere and came to the point.
"Ahem... Chairman. The reason we came to Starlight Food is..."
Leila explained it to Kim Sehee in detail. Walmart would take responsibility for distributing the plants Starlight Food produced across North America.
"The population of the United States alone is 330 million. Add Canada's forty million, and you reach an enormous 370 million."
Faced with numbers that suddenly felt real, Kim Sehee could not find her next words. No matter how dense Korea's population was for its land, next to America it was a drop in the bucket.
"And if you consider the level of consumption of each citizen, their purchasing power is far higher than in other overseas markets. From your position, Chairman, it would not be a bad choice."
Thinking of the average American salary, buying the plants Starlight Food sold would be no burden at all. They could even charge more than they did in Korea. Americans simply earned that much. Sales would be higher selling to America than to India, the most populous country in the world.
Set aside India's wealthiest tier, and the whole nation was poor. America had a lower class, yes, but it was a country where people earned well across the board. Selling Starlight Food's plants in America would bring in several times more than selling them in a developing country.
And the most important point was that the volume of plants Starlight Food could produce was limited. Hana's plants did grow far better than ordinary ones, but feeding the entire world was a little beyond them. Even if they used every field and pushed production to the absolute limit, entering the American market was as far as their supply could reach.
While Kim Sehee was still weighing it, Leila drove the point home.
"Walmart can concede as much as possible on the profit split. Our goal is to grow market share. Turning a profit comes second."
Amazon was climbing at a terrifying pace, and from Walmart's position they needed a special product sold only at Walmart if they were to stand against it.
Then consumers looking to cure their hair loss would have no choice but to come to Walmart.