Chapter 172 - 131: Are You Trying to Get Yourselves Killed?
Soon, Mrs. Zhao’s irritable voice drifted from the next room.
"Oh, for heaven’s sake! Aren’t you going to sleep? I’m never letting you take a nap again..."
...
At the crack of dawn the next day, Comrade Zhou and Comrade Zhou went out to buy groceries.
Today, they ordered two extra pig heads for Feiyan Restaurant.
"Zhou Yan, you’re ordering more and more pig heads every day. It’s getting hard for me to source them all," Zhang the Third said while helping load the pork into a back basket. "Getting six from the surrounding towns is my limit. If you want more, I’ll have to tell my cousin who’s a butcher in Jiazhou ahead of time and ask him to work something out. But to have them delivered here to Suji, it’ll be an extra fifty cents for shipping. That’s the price for a single load of up to ten heads."
"Alright," Zhou Yan agreed with a nod and a smile. "When I need more than five, I’ll let you know ahead of time, and we can ask your cousin to buy and deliver them for us. But you have to make it clear to him—no heads from diseased pigs, sick pigs, or old sows, and no heads that look bad. You know my standards for pork. If it’s not up to par, I won’t take it. They’ll have made the trip for nothing.
Not only will they lose out on the shipping fee, but they’ll also be stuck with the heads. As long as the pork is good, I pay cash on the spot. I won’t owe a single cent. We’ve both been Knife Makers for decades; we can tell good from bad."
"Hey, don’t you worry. If it doesn’t pass my inspection, I won’t bring it to you," Zhang the Third promised, patting his chest.
Zhou Yan was now his meat stall’s number one customer, ordering dozens of pounds of ribs, hind leg cuts, and pig heads every single day, consistently.
He used to work for three days and take one day off, but because of Zhou Yan, he’d switched to only taking Sundays off.
Zhou Yan was young, but his eye for meat was incredibly sharp.
If the meat quality was even slightly off, he’d turn on his heel and walk away, no arguments, no haggling.
Now, he carefully hand-picked the pork, afraid that if Zhou Yan wasn’t satisfied, he’d instantly lose a sale of dozens of pounds.
He bought the pig heads from other butchers at a haggled-down price, and by selling them to Zhou Yan, he could make a ten-cent profit per jin. Five pig heads meant an extra two yuan and fifty cents. That was easy money.
"Alright, we’ll be heading back then," Zhou Yan said. Solving the pig head supply issue was a weight off his mind.
He was paying sixty cents a jin for deboned pig head meat. As for the price Zhang the Third negotiated with the other butchers and how much of a profit he made, that was entirely up to his own abilities.
The pig heads Zhang the Third picked were never poor quality. As a Knife Maker with over twenty years of experience, he could tell good pork from bad with a single glance.
Zhou Yan was happy to be spared the trouble. Otherwise, just going around to buy pig heads from different Knife Makers one by one would take up his whole morning, and he’d have to haggle with all sorts of vendors.
’This is the value of a food supplier!’
On the way back, Comrade Zhou looked at Zhou Yan and said, "Zhou Yan, this book you borrowed... I don’t understand it. Does the library have *Water Margin*? Can you borrow a copy for me next time?"
"Sure, I’ll borrow it for you this afternoon," Zhou Yan said, smiling and nodding. Reading *Siege* had given even him a bit of a headache, to say nothing of Comrade Zhou.
Thinking of Wang, the library’s gatekeeper, Zhou Yan couldn’t help but smile.
’I wonder what book the Grandmaster will recommend to me today.’
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