Chapter 261 - 224: Memo: Xu An, an Especially Tricky Customer

Chapter 261: Chapter 224: Memo: Xu An, an Especially Tricky Customer

"...So, Boss Xu, that’s the situation. Are you sure you want to..."

The young real estate agent wanted to persuade Xu An to give up. But when he thought about the price he had worked so hard to negotiate and the commission Xu An had promised, he couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

’Two hundred thousand! The commission alone would be at least sixty thousand! That’s more than my salary and commissions for an entire year!’

"Please go and find out who the other boss interested in this storefront is and what price they’re negotiating," Xu An said, noticing the agent’s concern. "I’ve just about finished preparing the documents. I’m going to the financing and guarantee company this afternoon to discuss the loan. A cash deal won’t be a problem, and you’ll get every cent of your commission."

"Alright!" Hearing Xu An’s words, the young agent was fired up all over again.

After the agent left, Xu An opened the admin panel to check on the membership card sales.

It was eleven o’clock, an hour after the membership card feature had gone live. The in-store sign-ups were doing quite well, with forty-seven cards sold already, averaging a little over one per minute. Judging by the queue outside, he estimated in-store sales could reach two hundred.

He opened the online ordering page for Xu’s Fast Food Restaurant and went into the admin panel. ’Hmm... the number of membership cards is in the single digits... The single digits!’

Although one of those three cards had been topped up with a whopping one thousand yuan, it was just a drop in the bucket compared to the total funds he needed.

’Trying to do legitimate fundraising through membership cards was wishful thinking after all. Xu’s Fast Food’s reputation just isn’t strong enough. If it were a major local enterprise like Qiansheng Group, the cards would probably sell themselves.’

’No, wait. If my business was like Qiansheng Group, banks would be lining up at my door, begging me to take out a loan...’

Xu An shook his head, pushing the distracting thoughts away. With a sigh, he resignedly began to organize the necessary documents.

Unlike Hai City Bank, which had dedicated staff to help with the paperwork, the financing and guarantee company required Xu An to prepare all the materials himself. The required documents weren’t that different, though; the guarantee company just needed a few extra forms.

Before leaving, Xu An went to check on the second floor of the main restaurant, which had been converted from a customer dining area into a packing area for the Taobao Store’s braised dishes.

After a brief settling-in period, the ten students Old Han had found were now working smoothly and efficiently. The tasks of cutting, weighing, bagging, vacuum-sealing, and packing were all proceeding in an orderly fashion.

In just over an hour, three large cardboard boxes, all filled with packaged orders of braised dishes, were already stacked near the top of the stairs.

At their current pace, they should be able to send out over a thousand orders when the courier came for pickup that evening. The remaining orders could be shipped within the fourteen-day window.

By the time Tang Wen finished her other tasks, it was already noon. She was about to log into the admin panel to compile the membership card data when she remembered the restaurant closed at 2:30. After a moment’s hesitation, she decided to wait until after her afternoon nap to run the numbers.

She woke up at exactly two in the afternoon. By the time she finished organizing the morning’s paperwork, it was two-thirty, when Xu’s Fast Food Restaurant closed for the day.

Yawning, Tang Wen took a USB drive and left her office. She went behind the cash register in the main restaurant, greeted Granny Xu, then opened the admin panel for the membership card system. After exporting the data to the USB drive, she returned to her office with it.

There were two hundred seventy-two in-store sign-ups: one hundred forty-two people had topped up one hundred yuan, eighty-four had topped up two hundred, and forty-six had topped up five hundred, for a total of fifty-four thousand yuan.

These numbers were quite impressive. The restaurant’s average daily foot traffic was a little over five hundred, so for so many of them to sign up for membership cards was an extremely high conversion rate.

After tallying the in-store data, Tang Wen logged into the Xu’s Fast Food online ordering page and entered the admin panel.

’A total of seven hundred and two membership cards? Four hundred seventeen one-hundred-yuan cards... two hundred five two-hundred-yuan cards... seventy-five five-hundred-yuan cards... and there are actually five one-thousand-yuan cards!’

’Someone actually topped up a thousand yuan. I really underestimated the customers of Xu’s Fast Food!’

Just as she was about to enter a formula to calculate the total online top-up amount, her elbow accidentally bumped the mouse, bringing the admin panel to the front. As her right hand moved to close the browser window, her middle finger, as if with a mind of its own, lightly right-clicked and refreshed the page.

The new page showed a total of seven hundred thirty-three membership cards.

’Seven hundred thirty-three? Wasn’t it just seven hundred and two?!’

Tang Wen’s breath hitched. She quickly pulled up her spreadsheet and looked at the column for the number of cards. The three digits ’702’ were perfectly clear before her eyes. She couldn’t help but murmur aloud, "In just five minutes, it increased by a full thirty-one cards?"

To see if it was a coincidence or if the numbers were truly skyrocketing, she quickly switched back to the admin panel and right-clicked to refresh again.

Membership cards: seven hundred thirty-eight. In less than a minute, another five had been sold!