Chapter 143: I Really Was Just Trying to Save My Lord

They just opened up for direct sales, with a wholesale price of eighty cents per pack, and every package bore a label suggesting a retail price of one yuan. It was cash on delivery, strictly no credit.

The food factory dedicated a room to serve as a storefront. Purchasing a hundred packs qualified the buyer for the wholesale price, catering to both wholesale and retail customers.

However, when representatives from the Women's Federation, the trade union, or relevant factory departments arrived with a letter of introduction stating the items were for female employee welfare, the price dropped to sixty cents. The condition was that these goods could not be resold and had to be distributed for free; the factory would even send someone along to personally participate in the distribution.

This ensured the factory maintained a sterling reputation.

For the time being, requests for stocking from department stores and supply-and-marketing cooperatives were declined. Whenever asked, the standard reply was that they were conducting a market survey jointly with Jiangzhou City.

They needed to thoroughly gauge the entire sales volume first.

It is safe to say that throughout the entire 1980s, no product sales operation had ever grasped such a concept of big data.

Yet, the veteran security guard at the tax bureau courtyard was already sick of hearing about it.

Tax commissioners had to conduct similar ground-level surveys and gather various data to estimate a company's sales volume and profit. No matter how many clever disguises a business used, there was no escaping the proper amount of tax owed.

And the results obtained were nothing short of mind-boggling.

Initially, factors like information dissemination, bandwagon purchasing, and even subconscious hoarding might have skewed the data, making it unreliable.

Regardless, two thousand packs vanished from Shangzhou every single day in a flash.

When extended down to the county level, with a population of just over thirty thousand, five hundred packs sold out completely every day.

So they increased the supply, little by little.

Even vacuum-sealed plastic bags were brought back with the fleet and transported via passenger ferry to Shangzhou, yet the sanitary napkins remained in desperately short supply.

This made Rang Weidong wonder if countless rural women were also coming into town to buy them, or if economically savvy individuals were taking them to rural markets to sell.

That couldn't be right. At least back then, private hawking in the townships under the Shangzhou region could still lead to being branded as capitalist tails and getting chopped off.

Such daring outlaws must have been rare, let alone selling something like sanitary napkins.

It could only mean that the market demand was genuinely that immense.

After about ten days or so, the sales volume at the county level finally stabilized at around eight hundred packs per day.

In Shangzhou City, it hovered around four thousand packs.

Li Erfeng also set up a rural distribution point at the supply-and-marketing cooperative in the township of Baifeng Mountain, though it only moved fewer than ten packs a day.

Sales were meager.

Yet, following Rang Weidong's instructions, she still sent her younger sister to stake out the place for a day and secretly take photographs with a camera!

Both the county and Shangzhou City storefronts had photographs taken with such cameras.

Dong Xueying now admired the man to the point of utter devotion.

Holding her rice bowl, she sighed, "I really misjudged you. You're completely different from old You and the others; they never do this kind of painstaking, meticulous legwork to dig into detailed data. All their energy goes into external intelligence... well, actually, you just grab onto one useful thread and pursue it to the absolute depth..."

Rang Weidong glanced at her, nodded with a composed expression, and said yes, causing the young married woman to instantly blush and shut her mouth.

Such a pair of rascals could engage in subtle innuendo no matter what they talked about, silently agreeing to go play ball outside later.

Fortunately, the old house was dim with a small lightbulb. Li Erfeng, who had been listening with relish while holding her chopsticks, wondered why the conversation had suddenly been cut short.

Rang Weidong pulled the topic back on track: "Then I'll have to ask Erfeng to handle the townships... How about this, let's start by giving them away for free starting from junior high school. We'll take it step by step, first distributing from the county's primary schools up to junior and senior high schools. Could you trouble yourself to find a few more such schools? We'll still increase the quantity gradually, avoiding waste to gather precise data. It will be immensely useful in the future."

Li Erfeng couldn't help casting sideways glances at him. How come back when they were in school she hadn't noticed him being so worldly-wise—to the point of even knowing about such young girls' privacy?

Dong Xueying chuckled secretly, taking some credit for this. Back when she first used them, she had complained to the man about how much suffering she and her sisters had endured.

So, eager to serve the soup before her snicker turned into a laugh, she asked, "What use?"

Rang Weidong ticked off his fingers: "Right now, we're dispatching trucks to Yuezhou and Pingjing, and sending cargo ships to Shanghai and Zhejiang, all based on an estimated batch size of fifty thousand. In reality, that volume is probably only enough for a single city. Just how much needs to be shipped across all the counties and cities in the province, and what kind of production capacity our factory can actually scale up to—all of this can be calculated."

The two senior executives concluded their daily dinner meeting by agreeing to tackle their respective tasks.

As usual, after dinner, Rang Weidong said he was going to check on the food factory.

Dong Xueying stayed behind to wash the dishes and spent a while watching television across the street with the handful of young women living at her place.

Then, under the pretext of visiting a relative, she slipped out quietly, walked a couple of blocks, pulled open the door of the crew-cab truck parked against the wall, and slid inside without anyone noticing.

Having a vehicle—especially such a spacious crew cab—offered far too many possibilities for amusement.

Not to mention that this was early July; inside an air-conditioned car on a sweltering summer night, it was more comfortable than anywhere else in the entire city.

Perhaps only a handful of cold storage facilities could compare.

Once Li Erfeng was dispatched back to handle the primary and middle school giveaways, the two of them simply drove the truck into the food factory courtyard and spent the night inside it.

Of course, Rang Weidong knew to leave a crack in the truck window; otherwise, if a pair of wild mandarin ducks suffocated and ended up being gawked at by a crowd, it wouldn't look good.

Just as the primary reason he calculated big data was because the truth was awkward to explain and even harder for people to believe.

First, a bunch of production management workshop directors and shift leaders were transferred over to join.

The sanitary napkin factory was undoubtedly the absolute priority.

Production skyrocketed while wage expenditures did not increase proportionally.

In an era where everyone was accustomed to operating without any auxiliary equipment, packing three hundred packs per person daily was considered the limit.

One could push hard to exceed it, but it was difficult to sustain and such an exhaustive work style was not recommended.

Therefore, the general output was kept between one hundred and two hundred packs per person—rolling one to two thousand rolls before wrapping and packaging them—which was still quite intense physical labor.

Earning a daily wage of ten to twenty yuan was something Rang Weidong felt they deserved.

However, once these people arrived, they streamlined the process: those who rolled tubes only rolled tubes, and those who bagged them only bagged them, naturally boosting efficiency significantly.

Consequently, they naturally wanted to overhaul the wage structure as well. Earning a penny per rolled tube made this rate obviously too high.

It resulted in monthly salaries that were somewhat absurd, easily surpassing a hundred yuan and even approaching a thousand.

In an era where the average salary was only forty or fifty yuan, this already rivaled the high wages of foreign-affiliated hotel employees in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou!

Yet Rang Weidong couldn't bear to see these middle-aged women work themselves to the bone to improve their incomes only to have their earnings slashed in half.

If he could previously justify cutting the college students' sales commissions as a localized trial adjustment involving only a few people—whereby anyone who didn't want to work could get lost—the operation had now rapidly expanded to a scale of hundreds of workers.

Watching firsthand so many ordinary people from the very bottom of society, who were originally just like him and Dong Xueying, joyfully attain high incomes, while he himself wasn't losing any money, he simply couldn't bring himself to pull such a heartless stunt.

This windfall generated by commodity economic circulation was bound to shatter the planned economy's wage structure.

It was the inevitable shock brought by the reform and opening up.

By using machinery to save on labor costs across most of the production stages, the hefty profits that would have gone to capitalists or the state were instead distributed by Rang Weidong to the workers.

No wonder the state wanted to implement a dual-track system.

Only when running it themselves did they realize how easily this wage system could be breached.

Thus, they had no choice but to restrict everyone to working no more than eight hours a day, with two days off every week.

With such high wages, there was no need to push themselves so hard; everyone needed to learn how to care for their families, spend time with them, and enjoy life.

When these phrases popped into Rang Weidong's head, he even found himself wondering: Am I leading everyone to reach the level of a moderately developed country ahead of schedule?

Everyone else was still happy.

Yet Rang Weidong broke out in a cold sweat.

His trip to Shangzhou was precisely to observe and figure out a countermeasures.

Because if this were merely the venture of a small-scale merchant, the absolute limit in Jiangzhou might be an output of one hundred thousand packs a day. Any more than that couldn't be sold, and it wouldn't make anyone ridiculously wealthy.

As it happened, Rang Weidong had set his sights on the national market right from the start, and even contemplated advertising on CCTV.

The resulting volume would be staggering.

The workforce was expanding infinitely, yet there was still an endless amount of work to do.

This violent acceleration was no joke.

The few machines from the school-run factory remained dismantled, while the new workshop had already added forty-four machines, and production continued to expand steadily and persistently at a rate of two or three newly added machines every day!

The Jiangzhou University Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering had even independently set up a small school-run machinery factory.

Its sole purpose was to manufacture this equipment for the sanitary napkin factory, reportedly making it the wealthiest major in Jiangzhou University.

The current production capacity of one hundred fifty thousand packs per day relied on several hundred female workers sitting in a massive "disinfection workshop" manually rolling and bagging them.

Shen Cuiyue was already reporting that the women in the surrounding area had been fully recruited, and many were now starting to commute by bus from further away. The cafeteria could accommodate at most a thousand people, the restrooms were inadequate, and then there was...

The largest side effect of sanitary napkins had now been exposed in a factory swarming with women:

They were being treated like scrap toilet paper and discarded everywhere as waste.

In reality, these items were not biodegradable like toilet paper. Even ignoring environmental concerns, the visual was dreadful.

Rang Weidong immediately recalled the early days in the old residential courtyard when the toilets were constantly clogged.

He had to issue instructions to print warnings on the packaging labels emphasizing not to litter them.

A moment's thought revealed how terrifying this brand-new industrial scale would be once volume surged—used menstrual pads fluttering everywhere like trash?

The scenery was simply unimaginable.

Rang Weidong remembered that in his past life, there seemed to have been a period when red and blue plastic film bags polluted everywhere across the country. Could it be that in this era, before any national environmental awareness had formed, sanitary napkins took the lead, and he was expected to take the blame for this ecological mess?

Some chicken soup articles claimed that after decades of environmental pollution caused by Western enterprises, they were eventually hit with astronomical fines and settlements.

Thus, calculating the exact required output through big data was essentially figuring out how his own neck would be chopped off in the future!

He was merely a manufacturer who stumbled into producing sanitary napkins; what right did he have to educate consumers on their disposal habits?

It gave him a headache.

Even if he spoke out, no one would believe him: it's just littering, what does it have to do with us?

Currently, nobody possessed any environmental awareness, let alone the concept of severe liquidated damages and heavy penalties.

Just like the small river beside the Shangzhou Slaughterhouse and Leather Factory, which had been polluted for years, churning out thick layers of oily foam and sludge straight into the Yangtze River every single day.

Rang Weidong felt nauseous every time he looked at it.

He and Dong Xueying parked the truck in the courtyard here, feeling as though even the air-conditioning system couldn't filter out the strange odor permeating the air.

Yet, whether he undertook environmental cleanup work or not was futile; everyone else was discharging waste with total impunity.

The food factory itself poured hundreds of catties of offal grease down the drain every day.

Therefore, all Rang Weidong could do was throw himself frantically into construction.

Before he and Dong Xueying returned to Jiangzhou, they had already erected a new cooking workshop inside the food factory courtyard. This time, influenced by the sanitary napkin factory's "disinfection workshop," he doubled down even further.

The vacant lot behind the courtyard—roughly the size of a basketball field, previously consisting of an eroded earthen slope, a small path, and a stinking ditch leading to the riverbank—was entirely paved with concrete and leveled.

Following the layout of the previous cooking workshop, he built a massive, fully enclosed glass structure over the entire area!

Inside, it was constructed using the brick-concrete, bamboo, and wood structures common in Shangzhou, with glass heavily utilized for the walls and roof tiles.

Wherever load-bearing wasn't required, large panes of glass were used as substitutes as much as possible.

Shangzhou's sole glass factory—reportedly the place where old You had once worked as a laborer—went all out, dedicating its entire annual output to frantic supply.

Complying fully with Rang Weidong's amateur demands, they tried to make the window glass, which the locals previously only knew how to produce paper-thin, as thick as possible.

It didn't need to be made into massive sheets; television-sized panes of glass were simply used like bricks and laid between the load-bearing walls.

Since returning this time, they had been working on this project every day, which gave Rang Weidong an excuse to constantly stay at the factory.

The next step, once this "glass greenhouse" covering the rear half of the factory compound was completed, would be to tear down the front row of old houses and rebuild them into a modern glass building.

The goal was simple: this was the only way Rang Weidong could manifest a thoroughly modern architectural style in 1984.

He wanted the food factory to stand in Shangzhou with a completely revamped, modern posture.

This could also be considered the final effort he could make for You Qili.