Let's Buy Pajamas
Ding-dong—
The bright chime of the bell sent the children into a cheering uproar. The end of the school day always felt good, and for most kids who had to sit through class, wasn't this the hour they loved best? Watching their little antics, I found myself smiling along with them.
Third grade was supposed to be the prime of childhood, wasn't it? I propped my chin on my hand and watched them bounce around the room. I was a little different from the others—happy enough, certainly, but not the sort to fling my whole body into showing it. Before long the homeroom teacher came in and started getting everyone ready to leave.
"All right, you all worked very hard today! You'll get home safely, won't you?"
Seeing a teacher use polite speech even with children left me with an odd, awkward feeling. In my day, teachers spoke down to us, and if you didn't suit them, a switch across the calves was simply part of the routine. Try that now and you'd be buried under a barrage of complaints from parents. In a worse case, a parent might march straight into the school and slap the very teacher who had struck their child. The atmosphere was nothing like the old days.
Anyway, the moment the teacher finished speaking, the kids poured out of the classroom in a rush. I took my time packing up. Until Maru arrived, I had nowhere else to go—that was the quiet sorrow of commuting by car. I could have taken the bus, of course. I just didn't, because it ran well over an hour. The gap between a private car and the bus was enormous.
The distance itself wasn't all that far, but the research institute sat on the outskirts of the city, so the bus wound around and around to get there. Thirty minutes by car became nearly an hour and a half by bus. I pulled out my phone, meaning to text Maru that school was over, but Jiyu and Yumi put an end to that plan.
"Hana, let's go buy pajamas!"
"I heard a new place just opened!"
Jiyu and Yumi wanted to go pajama shopping. At that, I hurriedly rewrote the message I'd been about to send Maru and told her I'd be out for a while. Pajamas—well, it was about time I bought new ones myself. I'd been living in dinosaur pajamas, but the tail dragged along the floor until it wore clean through, so a replacement was overdue.
"Let's go!"
I caught Jiyu and Yumi by the hands and headed for the newly opened pajama shop. If I found a pair I liked, I meant to buy it and take it home.
Maybe because the shop sat near an elementary school, it was packed with pajamas sized for grade-schoolers. The moment I stepped inside, I couldn't help marveling at the sheer variety on display.
"Mom said to buy something I can actually sleep in!"
Jiyu held up a single card as she said it. A parent's card, no doubt. She and Yumi explained that they were buying new fall pajamas today—last year's set had gotten too small to wear. A year was plenty of time for an elementary school kid to grow, enough that pajamas from only last fall no longer fit at all.
"Hana, what kind are you getting?"
Yumi's question left me thinking. I was a little older now; maybe it was time to graduate from dinosaur pajamas. I figured I'd pick something plain and unremarkable.
"I'll just get something simple. Thin, and nice to the touch!"
"Yeah? Then let's go up to the second-floor corner! That's the girls' pajama section."
The first floor was the boys' section, so there was nothing for us to browse. Unless it was a skirt, pajamas were more or less the same whether a boy or a girl wore them, and they were clothes nobody else was supposed to see anyway. I was different, though. The staff would see them. Anything too sheer was out of the question.
I trailed after Jiyu and Yumi up to the second floor, where a glittering scene welcomed us. Women's pajamas, apparently—the colors alone were bright and cheerful. The men's section had carried a gloomy cast, but up here even the smell was different. The first floor had reeked of bachelor, yet the moment we climbed the stairs a sweet fragrance spilled over us, as if someone had sprayed the whole floor with perfume.
A clerk spotted us and greeted us with a smile.
"Welcome, little customers. If you're curious about anything, just ask your big sister, okay?"
"Okay!"
With that, she moved on to the other customers. Thank goodness. Having a clerk hovering while I picked out pajamas would have been a little uncomfortable. We were still looking around when a pair of dinosaur pajamas caught my eye. Because they were made for girls, they weren't the green ones I was wearing now.
They were pink.
Kim Sehee spoke with a look of regret.
"Starlight Food's crops are always running short. We still can't provide Walmart with the volume you're hoping for. It will take at least half a year before we can supply a stable quantity."
Just as she said, they didn't yet have enough to sell in the United States. They could have pulled stock out of Korea and shipped it to America, but there was no need to take that risk. Hearing this, James offered an alternative.
"Then how about entrusting the farming to us at Walmart? We're as accomplished in agriculture as we are in distribution. We won't disappoint you. America has an enormous amount of idle land, and that land is very fertile."
Even so, Kim Sehee stroked her chin as if weighing the offer, then answered.
"Our crops are unusual plants that grow only under special conditions. Farm them in America and they'll play the unfilial child—never bearing a single fruit."
At that, James had no choice but to bite down hard on his lip. There was nothing to be done. If there was no stock to sell, what was he supposed to do about it? Watching his expression, Kim Sehee decided the moment had come to bring out what she had been holding back.
"The other crops are still short, but we can supply Tangle to the United States right away. The harvest is exceptionally large. However..."
James's face had no choice but to bloom wide open. The other crops were precious too, but none of them was Tangle. Tangle was a divine crop, one that could save the tens of millions of Americans living with hair loss.
"Is that so? Then we can put Tangle into distribution immediately."
Leila, seated beside him, cut across his words.
"Is there some problem with Tangle?"
She had seen that Kim Sehee's expression wasn't good, and wondered whether some harsh condition was about to follow.
"We have the raw material. The problem is packaging it so it can actually reach consumers. We could just stuff it into bags and hand it over, of course, but..."
Hearing the problem, James answered as if to tell her not to worry.
"That's a problem we can solve!"
All they had to do was pick an idle factory and contract the manufacturing out. America was vast, and idle factories were plentiful.
The terms of distribution were satisfactory to Kim Sehee as well, so she didn't drag things out any further.
"Then we'll entrust Starlight Food's products to Walmart."
"An excellent choice. We'll divide the distribution profit at a ratio Starlight Food will find satisfactory. Your company will, however, need to keep the supply of Tangle steady. Natural disasters or unavoidable circumstances can always arise, of course, so I think we should spell that out separately in the contract."
The negotiation moved at a brisk pace. Since they were selling only Tangle for the time being, the shape of the deal came together quickly. They would distribute in the United States first, and once the volume had stabilized, extend distribution as far as Canada.
Walmart would handle everything. Export, management, distribution, sales—every part of the work was decided to fall on Walmart's side. All Starlight Food had to do was supply Tangle at a steady pace. In a sense, it might have looked like easy money. But given the effect Tangle possessed, these were the terms of a golden apple you simply could not have without offering something of the kind.
"A fine negotiation. I hope we'll continue to enjoy a good relationship with Starlight Food."
"I'd like to keep a good relationship with Walmart as well."
The negotiation ended in success. Walmart had made the first approach, but Starlight Food had succeeded in breaking into the United States, the largest market in the world. India and China were there too, of course, but neither country's per capita income amounted to much.
To put it bluntly, selling in America would earn far more than selling in China or India. People in those countries were hardly eager to spend money on hair loss. When the average monthly wage didn't even reach a thousand dollars, they couldn't keep paying out a Korean-style price of a hundred and fifty dollars every month. America was different. Americans, whose average monthly pay ran to five thousand dollars, would take Tangle the way they took medicine when it cost only a hundred and fifty dollars a month.
"We could probably charge even more. American incomes are the highest in the world."
According to James, even ten dollars apiece would be more than enough.