Volume 1: Reborn in the 1980s, selling lunch boxes with my mother Chapter 161 Grandma Hu's Big Meat Zongzi
Yao Huifen and her two daughters made so much money for the store that they didn't have a single day off during the New Year. Hu Qiongfang discussed it with her daughter and decided to give each of the three of them a red envelope of 500 yuan.
Yao Huifen was startled, as if the red envelope was hot, and pushed it away hurriedly.
"No, Sister Qiongfang, this is too much!"
Hu Qiongfang told her about the salary she would get for helping out in the store. She would know how to make dumplings, buns, and roll noodles, and would help out in the kitchen. Her food and accommodation would be provided, and the salary would be 40 yuan a month.
This salary level is something Yao Huifen could not even imagine.
But this time, the red envelope Hu Qiongfang gave her was a thick stack of big unity bills. Just by touching it, she could tell that it was at least several hundred yuan, which was enough for her annual salary.
How can this be possible?
"Why is it not possible? You three have been working hard for the business of the restaurant. During the New Year, you haven't rested for a single day. If it weren't for you, how could my restaurant make so much money during the New Year?"
"Sister Huifen, if you don't want this red envelope, then you think it's too little?"
Hu Qiongfang has said so much, how could Yao Huifen dare to refuse?
Seeing that she had received the money and thinking of what her daughter said on the way back, Hu Qiongfang pulled Yao Huifen aside and advised her to take out her savings and build two or three houses along the provincial road.
"It's better not to have that man of yours. We married daughters can't always live in our parents' home. Besides, I heard that your parents don't have a decent house. You might as well build two or three brick houses here while you have money. They don't have to be too big, just enough for you three to live in."
"Sister Huifen, you've seen it too. Apart from other things, it's easier to find a job here than in the village. You still have two children to raise. Why don't you take advantage of the loose supervision now to put down roots here? Are you going back to the village with your children?"
This is the sorrow of these married women.
Married daughters are like spilled water, and they cannot inherit their natal house and land. Their husband's house and land also belong to their husband.
Why do many rural women not dare to divorce their husbands even though they are abused by their husbands? Is it because they like being beaten?
It's just that after the divorce, I have nowhere to go.
Once divorced, they have no share of the land on their husband's side, and their parents' side will not give them any land. Without land, they cannot grow food, and if they have no way to go out to work, they can only become "blind migrants".
Hu Qiongfang's words really touched Yao Huifen's heart.
It was just after the Chinese New Year, and many strong laborers in the countryside would take advantage of the slack season to do odd jobs. Yao Huifen asked her second uncle Hu for help and found the contractor who had built a house for the Hu family before. They built a two-and-a-half-room brick house on a piece of gravel ground next to Hu Qiongfang's restaurant and next to her house.
A small kitchen was built next to it using the remaining bricks.
This piece of gravel land was used by the construction team to store gravel when the provincial road was being built. There are also many cement blocks on the ground, and nothing grows here except weeds. Local people nearby don't go here to reclaim land, so it was a good deal for Yao Huifen, who got this piece of land for free.
It’s also good that the ground is covered with sand and gravel. The yard is especially clean on rainy days, without any mud at all.
After the house was built, Yao Huifen immediately sent her son and daughter back to school so that they could continue their studies.
She now earns 40 yuan a month, which is enough to support her two children if she saves a little. Yao Huifen is determined to give her children a better life. In addition to working in the store during the day, she also takes on the job of making rice dumplings from Grandma Hu in the evening.
Grandma Hu provided the raw materials such as glutinous rice, bamboo leaves and cotton thread, and Yao Huifen was only responsible for wrapping the glutinous rice and meat filling into dumplings of similar weight.
The labor fee for wrapping a zongzi is one cent, and she can wrap more than 200 zongzi in one night . Although the labor fee for one zongzi is not much, the zongzi are wrapped quickly, and she can earn more than two yuan a night, which means more than 60 yuan a month!
It’s higher than her salary at Fangjie Hotel.
Who would have thought that the rural woman who was almost beaten to death by her husband can now earn a hundred yuan a month?
This was one hundred yuan in 1986, and its purchasing power was equivalent to a monthly salary of over ten thousand yuan in later generations.
He Chunling and her brother both went back to school, which made Hu Qiongfang more active.
She wanted Jiang Tian to go back to school as well.
But what she didn't expect was that her daughter was much more interested in making money than going to school . Before she could even open her mouth, Jiang Tian posted a job notice at the entrance of the hotel.
After the Chinese New Year, it’s time for her and her grandmother to open their food workshop.
There is no need to purchase any assembly line machines to process zongzi, and it does not require any technical content. The only thing that needs to be kept secret is the recipe for the zongzi filling. She and Grandma Hu have already discussed this, and it must be mastered by her family.
Other procedures, such as processing the rice leaves, washing and soaking the glutinous rice, wrapping the rice dumplings, and vacuum packaging, can all be done by hiring people.
After the workshop is opened, product promotion must also keep up.
This is why Jiang Tian did not go back to school with He Chunling - the family had not been exposed to the dazzling advertising bombardment and channel promotion in later generations. No matter how delicious the rice dumplings are, if the sales channels cannot be opened, the scale of this workshop will always be only a small handmade workshop.
When Grandma Hu was training new employees at home, Jiang Tian asked Jiang Cheng and He Chunsheng, two young assistants, for help and hand-copied a hundred "business cards". On the front was the sign "Grandma Hu's Big Meat Zongzi" and the big words "Delicious, convenient, good value for money", and below was the detailed address of the zongzi workshop.
She originally wanted to print a phone, but nowadays ordinary families rarely install telephones, and even if they could install one, she would not be willing to do so. I heard that if an individual installs a telephone, the initial installation fee, the wiring fee, the telephone fee, and all the other things added up, it would cost at least tens of thousands to install a telephone!
Jiang Tian felt that there was no need to spend the money, because her "promotion plan" was to run along both sides of Provincial Highway 336 at the beginning. Everyone lived along this road, so if anyone wanted to do the rice dumpling business, they could just come over according to the address.
In this way, over a few days, Jiang Tian rode his bicycle, starting from a rice dumpling workshop, and visited all the businesses, big and small, within an hour's drive on both sides of Provincial Highway 336.
She also brought some samples for people to try.
It’s not that no one has ever thought about it. After eating the sample given by Jiang Tian, they tried to imitate it at home.
It turned out that the rice dumplings they made were a little bit different from the ones Jiang Tian gave them.
Then I looked at the "unified purchase price" on the "business card". I knew how to make a living and silently calculated in my mind that I could wholesale the rice dumplings from the workshop and sell them back without having to worry about anything. I could sell dozens of them every day and make a few dollars. That seemed not bad, right?
Anyway, it won’t interfere with your business, so why not give it a try?
