Chapter 13: Market Research
Ricky adjusted the rough collar of his wool vest, his boots clicking against the stone sidewalk. Beside him, Marek walked with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his flat cap pulled down low enough to shade his eyes.
"Let’s try the tailor," Marek muttered, nodding toward a narrow storefront with a gold-leaf sign on the glass.
Inside the shop, a bell jingled over the door as they stepped in. The air smelled of hot iron, steam, and dry wool. A bald man with a measuring tape draped over his neck was smoothing out a roll of heavy dark broadcloth on a long wooden table.
Ricky then asked. "Hello, sir. Are you looking for any help on your shop?"
"Help?" the tailor asked, not looking up from his work. "I have no space for help. I have my cousin’s boy coming from New Jersey next week. I only hire family."
They went to a grocery three doors down. The storefront was crowded with wooden crates of small, bruised winter apples and cabbage and Ricky asked the same question.
The grocer, a stocky man with thick forearms covered in flour, didn’t even stop sweeping his floor. "I just hired a boy yesterday to haul the flour sacks. Come back in the spring."
At the bakery, the scent of hot bread was almost painful to Ricky’s empty stomach. The baker was a red-faced man who looked like he hadn’t slept in thirty hours. "Our business is slow this season." he sighed, wiping sweat from his forehead with a rag. "People aren’t buying loaves like they used to this month. I can’t even afford to keep my regular delivery boy full-time."
They tried a butcher shop where raw beef carcass hung from iron hooks in the window, dripping slow, dark drops of blood into a metal tray of sawdust. The butcher, wielding a heavy cleaver that struck a wooden block with deafening thuds, shook his head. "You got experience? Can you skin a hog in under ten minutes? No? Then I got no use for you."
At a three-story brick boarding house with a tarnished brass plaque, a young clerk in a stiff white collar met them at the desk. He looked at Ricky’s sturdy wool clothes and Marek’s worn cap, giving them a polite but firm smile. "The manager only takes on boys recommended by the other merchants on Bleecker Street. It’s a matter of trust, you see. If Mr. Gold or Mr. Whitaker speaks for you, we might have an opening for a night porter next month."
No one insulted them. No one yelled or threw them out. There were no gang members looking to pick a fight, and no coppers eyeing them with suspicion. It was worse than that.
They were simply invisible—unknown strangers in a city where every penny was accounted for and every job was a lifeline handed down through blood or neighborhood favors.
"It’s no use," Marek grumbled as they stepped back out onto the cobblestones of Bleecker Street. A heavy beer dray rumbled past, the iron rims of its massive wooden wheels screeching against the stone. Marek kicked a loose piece of gravel into the gutter. "We’ve walked six blocks. Back at the docks, if you want work, you just stand in the line and hope the foreman picks you. Here... it’s like trying to climb a glass wall."
He looked around, his shoulders slumping. To Marek, the bustling streets of the Village suddenly seemed vast, indifferent, and freezing cold. "Maybe we should head back to the West Side. At least there we know which alleys to avoid."
Ricky didn’t answer right away. He was leaning his shoulder against a brick lamppost, his eyes scanning the street.
Every time a door opened, every time they walked away from a rejection, Ricky hadn’t been looking at the "Help Wanted" signs. He’d been listening. He’d been watching the way the shop owners moved, the tension in their shoulders, and the way they spoke when they thought the two quiet boys were just idling by the door.
They weren’t talking about a lack of customers. They were talking about deliveries.
Just across the street, outside the bakery they had visited ten minutes ago, a teamster in a grease-stained leather apron was pointing a thick finger at the baker’s chest. "I don’t care if the canal was frozen!" the teamster shouted over the noise of a passing trolley. "The price of flour went up six cents a barrel today! You take the invoice as it is, or I haul it back to the terminal!"
The baker looked like he wanted to spit in the man’s face, but he reluctantly signed the ledger anyway.
Farther down Bleecker, two grocers in matching white aprons stood on the curb, their arms crossed.
"...three days late," one was saying, his voice sharp with frustration. "The apples are already soft. How am I supposed to sell soft apples at retail? And the wholesaler in Brooklyn says if I don’t like it, I can buy from the Italians."
"The Italians are charging double for transport," the other replied, shaking his head.
Ricky walked a little slower, his boots dragging slightly as he watched a delivery wagon pull up to a small restaurant.
The owner, a thin man with a stained apron, came running out to meet the driver. "Where’s the coffee? I told you we were down to our last half-bag yesterday!"
"Wholesaler’s out of the Brazilian beans," the driver yelled back, not even looking down as he tossed a small crate of lard onto the sidewalk. "You’ll get ’em when the next steamer docks. Maybe Tuesday."
The restaurant owner muttered an oath and threw his hands up, stomping back inside.
Ricky’s mind began to click, the gears turning with a familiar, quiet precision.
Every single merchant on Bleecker Street had a different complaint, but the root cause was identical. It wasn’t that people didn’t want to buy their bread, their cloth, or their coffee. It was that their supply chains were completely broken.
Outside a dry goods shop, Ricky watched a clerk struggle to unload a crate of wooden crates. One of the boxes had split open, spilling handfuls of iron screws into the dirty slush on the sidewalk. The owner was standing over him, red-faced, shouting about damaged inventory and demanding a refund the distributor would likely take months to approve.
I’m looking at this all wrong, Ricky thought.
He had been thinking like an eighteen-year-old kid from Atlanta looking for a shift to punch. He was thinking like an employee. He was competing with every desperate, hungry man who stepped off a boat at Ellis Island or walked down from the tenements of the Lower East Side.
He didn’t need a job. He had the Founder’s Ledger.
Ricky closed his eyes for a split second. The blue interface of the Ledger floated in his mind, steady and silent.
[ FOUNDER’S LEDGER — SYSTEM CORE ]
Repository I
— Steam & Steel Age (1900–1914) — UNLOCKED
The Ledger wasn’t just a secure bank to hold his daily workout money. It was a manufacturing catalog. It priced everything at original factory manufacturing cost, completely bypassing retail markups, wholesale profits, shipping delays, frozen canals, and distributor greed.
If a merchant on Bleecker Street was paying inflated prices for delayed, damaged goods, Ricky could procure those exact same goods instantly, in perfect condition, for pennies on the dollar.
"Hey," Marek said, nudging his elbow. "You listening to me, Ricky? I said we could try the East Side. Or maybe the Bowery. There’s got to be someone hiring loaders near the railyards."
Ricky turned to look at him. "Every unemployed guy in New York is on the East Side, Marek. They’re all competing for twelve cents an hour."
Marek frowned. "Yeah, but what else are we gonna do? We need an income. We can’t live off Mrs. O’Connell’s charity forever, even if we are paying rent."
"Look at the street," Ricky said, pointing toward a delivery wagon that was currently trying to back into a narrow alley, its driver cursing at a pedestrian. "Every store owner out here is struggling to get what they need to sell. If they don’t have flour, they can’t make bread. If they don’t have coal, they can’t heat their shops. If they don’t have steel, they can’t work."
Marek blinked, looking from the wagon back to Ricky. "So?"
"So, the market for labor is full," Ricky said, a quiet, steady confidence settling into his chest. "But the market for supply is wide open."
Before Marek could ask another question, Ricky turned on his heel and walked right back toward the dry goods store they had passed minutes before.
"Ricky!" Marek hissed, scurrying to keep up. "What are you doing? They already told us they didn’t have any work!"
"We aren’t asking for work," Ricky said.
He pushed the heavy wooden door open, the brass bell jingling sharply.
The shop owner, a middle-aged man with wire-rimmed spectacles and graying hair, looked up from his ledger behind the counter. His face fell slightly when he recognized Ricky and Marek.
"I told you boys before," the owner said, his voice tired but not unkind. "I don’t have the coin to hire extra hands. I’m barely clearing enough to pay my rent this month."
"I know," Ricky said, stepping up to the counter. He kept his posture relaxed, his hands out of his pockets. He didn’t sound like a desperate kid begging for a wage anymore.
His voice was practical, direct, and conversational. "I’m not looking for a job. I actually wanted to ask you about your stock."
The shop owner paused, his pen hovering over the paper. "My stock?"
"Yeah," Ricky said, leaning slightly against the wooden counter. "I noticed your clerk unloading those iron wood screws outside. Looked like half of them were rusted through or bent."
The merchant let out a bitter, dry laugh. "Rusted? Try entirely ruined. Paid three dollars for the crate, and I’ll be lucky if I can sell fifty cents’ worth of usable hardware. Wholesaler says it’s the dampness in the warehouse down by the canal. Like that’s my problem."
"Does that happen often?" Ricky asked.
"Every second shipment," the man muttered, closing his ledger with a soft thud. "If it’s not rust, it’s late. I’ve been waiting on a crate of steel wood files for three weeks. Customers come in, they ask for them, I tell them next week, and they walk out and go to the big department stores downtown. It’s killing my trade."
"What about nails?" Ricky asked. "The standard wire nails."
"Can’t keep ’em in," the merchant said, warming up to the complaint. It was clear he didn’t get many people willing to listen to his daily frustrations. "But the distributor wants me to buy them by the ton if I want the bulk rate. I don’t have the floor space or the capital to store a ton of nails. I need them by the hundred-weight, but they won’t deliver less than half a ton without charging me a premium that eats all my profit."
Ricky nodded slowly, absorbing every word. He didn’t offer any solutions. He didn’t mention the System Shop or the fact that he could materialize a hundred-weight of perfect, rust-free steel nails for less than a quarter.
To the shop owner, Ricky was just a curious, polite young man passing the time.
To Ricky, this was the most valuable market research he could have ever asked for.
"Thanks," Ricky said, giving the man a respectful nod. "I appreciate the talk."
"Anytime, son," the merchant said, picking up his pen again. "If you see any distributors who actually know how to run a wagon, send ’em my way."
As they stepped back out onto Bleecker Street, the cold air felt different to Ricky. The chaotic noise of the city—the rattling wheels, the steam whistles, the shouting teamsters—didn’t feel like a wall of sound designed to drown him out anymore.
It felt like a market waiting to be captured.
"Ricky," Marek said, staring at him with a mix of confusion and sudden realization. "What are you planning?"
Ricky patted Marek’s shoulder, a sharp grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Come on. We’ve got a lot of work to do. And it starts with asking questions."