On October 1, 1648, Meilin Port, Meilin County.[][]..[]

Agnelli had just finished the pot bottom for a woman from Mingguo in the East. Now, he was preparing to pack up his things and board the ship to his next destination, Hekou Township, Zhenhai County, and meet with Gao Jinzhong who returned early. He had made up his mind to stop being a pot maker anymore, because this industry was hard and he didn't make much money. Now he thought of trying his luck with his old comrade Gao Jinzhong and working with him to do a machine flour business, maybe he could make a fortune?

However, before leaving, he didn't mind visiting an old acquaintance in his hometown - a small vendor who once traveled with him. This small vendor comes from Mingguo in the east. It was originally said that he was an employee of a small silk shop. After immigrating to the east coast, he gave up his status as a farmer (can own arable land), and instead applied for a vendor license, and started a small vendor business that traveled to the west.

At the beginning, his scope of activities was limited to Port Melin. At that difficult time of starting a business, he was able to eat only one meal a day, and then carry a small ragged basket and go around the streets to do business. He didn't sell many goods and limited quantities, but this did not prevent him from winning praise from the surrounding neighbors with his enthusiasm, honesty and sincerity. At that time, Agnelli was also doing business in Port Melin, which was called Castle Melin. They helped each other and had a good relationship.

When Meilin Port was officially established in early 1641, this guy's "equipment" had changed from a small basket to a big bag; and when Meilin Port was withdrawn from the fort and established a town and entered the channel of accelerated development, his "equipment" was upgraded to a slow horse and three or four bags again.

In 1644, when Qishan Township was established, Agnelli met him again. At that time, he had already owned a small horse-drawn truck and the scale of his business had reached a new level. By the time Meilin County was officially established in January 1647, this guy was already a well-known businessman nearby. At the request of some old customers in the county, he began to open a shop in the county that specialized in all kinds of high-quality goods (dyed cloth, printed cloth, high-quality wool velvet, high-end fur, imported wine, whale oil products, etc.), which was specially used by women from the middle-class family in the city (the East Coast is not yet a strict sense of wealthy people) families.

A few years ago, Agnelli had the honor to meet a senior cloth vendor publicly expressing his gratitude to customers who took care of his business in the past, and then announced that he would no longer go to market or go to various places to sell. Instead, he would open a fixed store in the county town, hoping that everyone would continue to support him. His friends have now embarked on this path. To be honest, Agnelli is still quite envious.

It's a long way to go. This store of Agnelli's friend happened to compete with the state-owned stores that mainly sell cheap daily necessities, so the business was pretty good. After all, the main purpose of state-owned stores is not to make money. It also undertakes many government functions, namely, to stabilize prices, etc., and it will bear some policy losses every year. Most of the daily necessities sold are ordinary cotton, salted fish, oil, salt, sauce and vinegar. There is basically no competition between the two.

Speaking of this, I have to say something more. Since the train was opened and the emergence of state-owned stores, the number of hawkers near Meilin Port has begun to decline sharply. Even the markets that were originally formed regularly have become much more depressed. Farmers are more willing to buy things in state-owned stores with low prices, and are not willing to buy some second-hand goods from hawkers at the market. Now there are still mobile hawkers in some remote villages. However, with the great development of domestic transportation infrastructure, these hawkers will eventually be ruthlessly eliminated by the market, just like Agnelli was driven from one place to another by train. The development of the east coast is really too fast! The transformation of society is really dazzling!

The disintegration of rural or urban markets has directly led to the establishment of a large number of professional markets. Agnelli vaguely heard that in Dongfang County, the capital and Ping'an County, the industrial center of the northern region, a super-large store called "department stores". Everything that can be bought in small private stores (mostly opened by handicraftsmen) can be bought in one trip to those department stores, which is very convenient and fast.

Moreover, it is said that shopping at department stores is also a very fashionable and popular thing. These stores often employ dozens of clerks, many of which are bankrupt small vendors, and enthusiastically entertain every customer. They have all kinds of goods, and those who buy ten-yuan goods are treated the same as those who buy one-yuan goods. Especially the state-owned No. 1 department store in the capital Dongfang County, which is said to sell hundreds of goods, and no store in the country or even the entire New World can compare with it.

The emergence of professional or comprehensive stores (department stores) has replaced the functions of vendors running around and has also changed people's inherent consumption habits. The continuous construction and improvement of railways, highways and canals have an unparalleled acceleration of this trend. Even in the six coastal counties, many people's clothes are no longer sewn at home, and they have turned to customize or purchase them from professional or comprehensive stores.

"God testifies that living on the East Coast is really difficult. According to the words of the newspaper, it is that society is accelerating its transformation and the pace of life is getting faster. Alas, but it is much better than the old continent after all. Here, I can do many things freely, and I have infinite possibilities to live a decent life through my own efforts." Agnelli held the jingling pot-making tool in his hand, and walked along the street towards the front.

This is the hottest place in Meilin County. A stone bridge spans both sides of the Meilin River. On both ends of the bridge are two huge markets, one is called the farmers' market and the other is the cloth wholesale market. Meilin Port, as an important north-south transshipment node and the starting point for coastal areas to advance to the inland hinterland (through the Yihe Water System), naturally became a large cargo distribution center. In the Yihe area, many town owners or vendors in the Northwest Reclamation Bureau all went to Meilin Port to purchase goods and then found ways to transport them back for sale, which created the prosperity of some wholesale markets in the county.

At this time, the place where Agnelli stood was called "Qiaodong Cloth Wholesale Market". A large number of cloth salesmen or intermediaries searched for each potential customer in the crowd with their bright eyes. They wore clothes of different colors and clearly divided into two camps. One specialized in various types of cloth produced by Dayuhe Machinery Textile Factory, and the other specialized in selling textiles produced by Ping'an Weaving Factory in the north. The two sides competed fiercely in the famous goods distribution center of Qiaodong Wholesale Market, trying to make every vendor or shop owner who came to purchase goods they bought.

The means of competition are nothing more than cheap sales and various short-selling promises. Of course, in this process, we will inevitably criticize our competitors. These are all due to their intentions. Agnelli has long been accustomed to it. Near the wholesale market, there are some shops selling various textiles. Some shops are very stylish, with glass windows and gold foil sticking on the walls in the shops, which is very stylish.

The owners of these shops were originally small vendors, but later they were recruited by two major textile factories to become agents and began to sell their finished products for these upstream manufacturers. Since this is a distribution center for goods, some smart and capable people quickly completed the original accumulation and then directly obtained goods from the factory to sell them in their own stores. As the competition became increasingly fierce, they began to hire some salesmen to start soliciting customers outside to sell goods in their own stores. This is how the business system developed step by step.

Through the bustling wholesale market in Qiaodong, Agnelli crossed the stone bridge and came to the farmers' market in Qiaoxi. Unlike industrialized goods such as cloth, the sales in the farmers' market have not changed much over the years. Except for a few foods such as whale meat, salted fish, dried fruits, and tobacco that were transported from afar, the rest of the products such as vegetables, fresh meat, poultry and eggs, butter, soy products, etc. are all produced locally.

Many years ago, this was an agricultural product market. Farmers in the countryside regularly brought their own goods to the market for sale. Now there is still not much change in this model. Except for the market that has been changed from open-air to rooftops, the sellers here are still those people. Perhaps there are fewer direct producers among them, and there are more merchants going to the countryside to buy farmers' products and come back to resell them, but the change in this trend is still extremely slow, far less rapid and drastic than the industrial product market.

The streets of the market are a bit narrow, with a large number of carriages and pedestrians crowding among them. Meilin Port is the location of the Southern Vehicle Factory. In this city, merchants or shop owners buy minivans very high. They take the trucks to Siliba Township to collect agricultural products and then transport them back to their stores for sale.

Agnelli smelled the pungent fishy smell from some horse-drawn carriages. Those were merchants who went to the fishing village near Lake Milin to buy fresh or salted fish. Occasionally there was some horse manure or cow manure on the ground, which was so smelly that it made people complain. Agnelli also looked at his feet carefully, fearing that he would be squeezed into the cow manure by pedestrians if he was accidentally squeezed into the cow manure.

An unexpected truck transporting milk appeared on the street. These milk were produced in nearby suburbs, and some cream even came from Yangma Township in the East. The emergence of this new industry was due to the great development of transportation and the vigorous construction of county and township roads, making logistics transportation much more convenient than in the past, which made milk, a commodity that focused on transportation time, begin to enter the city from the countryside.

Some milk merchants (often transformed by dairy farmers who completed their original accumulation) hired cheap Italian or Guarani women (who often also worked part-time prostitutes) to act as milk girls, wearing uniform clothing to large-scale entrepreneurial dependent areas such as Southern Vehicle Factory and Railway Machinery Factory—inhabitants in these areas are the main force in milk consumption.
Chapter completed!