Don't Turn from Summer Chapter 6

Note: I tried Chapter 7 first. But then I decided to do Chapter 6 as well, as the previously translations (See Chapter 1-3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5) only covered the first five chapters, to make the translation continuous.

Don't Turn from Summer (莫负寒夏) by Ding Mo (丁墨)
Chapter 6

Monkey tells Mu Hanxia a story.

The story he heard that happened in the year Lin Mochen graduated from Columbia University.

The family of one of Lin Mochen's classmates was a farm owner in the fruit business. Because farming was highly mechanized in the US and the government provided stipends, the farms in the area all had surplus produces and couldn’t sell a good price.

So, Lin Mochen partnered with his classmates to sell the fruits.

Others did fruit business by building relations, doing marketing, and working on shipment. He didn’t do the same. After quietly preparing for a few months, he suddenly opened a new website named OneFresh.

What’s this website for? Specifically selling fruits, to the white-collars in Manhattan.

The website advocated: One fresh fruit a day is the healthy life style the Manhattan people are supposed to lead. Too busy at work to remember to buy? No problem. You only need to place an order on the website. The fruit will be delivered to a convenience store closest to you at fixed times every day. All you need to do is pick it up on your way to and from work or at lunch breaks.

Furthermore, the fruits we sell are absolutely fresh. Every fruit will be accompanied by a card, marking on which day, at which hour, from whose farm, Tom’s or Jack’s, and from which tree the fruit was picked. This will definitely be fresher than those you get from supermarkets or fruit stores, as they are not leftovers nor long-stored. (Of course, whether this was true only Lin Mochen would know.)

The target customers were ladies, but gentlemen were especially welcome to place a long-term order as a gift to their girlfriends. The website would also add a rose in the delivery. Thanks to the social network and personal influence Lin Mochen and his friends had in the local area, the website quickly got popular around the whole Manhattan area.

As it generated profit, others got jealous. The originally biggest fruit supplier in the New York area was the first one who got unhappy.

First, they did promotion. But no use. The white-collars totally ignored them. After all, what they now ate was a matter of style and a gift bestowed. Who cares whether the apple you sell is two cents cheaper?

Then the competitors also built websites, hoping to imitate their service pattern. It could have been a dangerous thing in the business world, because once the pattern created by a small company is copied by a large one, with the greater power of the large company, the small company has no choice but die.

However, the competitors suddenly found out that the website couldn’t be created. Why?

Because Lin Mochen had secretly signed agreements with those convenience stores -- they could only provide the fruit storage and delivery service exclusively for him. Otherwise they would face very expensive penalty. As there had been nobody who did this kind of thing before, those stores signed without any hesitation after getting a little payment from Lin Mochen.

The previous few months Lin Mochen spent quietly were spent on these deals.

The fruits from the competitors might not be worse than those sold by Lin Mochen, and their prices could be even lower. But now they had no access to the customers at all.

They were so furious that they went underhanded. They stole some farm owners from Lin Mochen, threatened and beat up their delivery people, and even sent him threatening letters. Lin Mochen wasn’t afraid at all. The website was still prosperous. It even announced ambitious goals such as “sales of 5 thousand million by the year end” and “expansion to the whole nation in three years.”

In the end, the competitors had no choice but inviting Lin Mochen over for negotiation.

The result of the negotiation was that the competitors paid a lot of money for the exclusive sales right from Lin Mochen, and after that the OneFresh website was not allowed to provide the similar fruit delivery service. They say that this battle resulted in Lin Mochen and his partners making a great fortune.

......

“How do you feel about it?” Asked Monkey.

Mu Hanxia: “Impressive...But I don’t see anything he did was so unkind here.”

Monkey: “Uh-uh, you think this is the end? ”

......

The competitors thought so too, as they were investing a lot of money on promotion,  stocking up huge fruit inventory, and were ready to launch their website. When customers saw OneFresh no longer deliver fruits, they would switch to the new website. Everything looked great.

Just then, OneFresh launched the Fruit’s Heart Card.

What’s it? The website said, to thank the loyal customers, we will provide you with a batch of fruits with equally high quality but extremely low price. This time we don’t profit from it. You only need to place an order from the website for a Heart Card, and then you can go to several large local supermarkets--our pick-up locations--to pick up the present for you. You will have money left on the card which you can keep for future use.

Some customers bought the card, went to take a look at the supermarkets, and were pleasantly surprised. Those were still the same fruits as before, each with their birth tags, while the prices were even lower than before and than the competitors. They were also much lower than the promotional prices of regular fruit stores! How extraordinary and unprecedented!

Of course the price would be low. Because Lin Mochen threw in all the money he got from the competitors.

It was not long before the sales soared. It was said that at least several hundred million Heart Cards of $100 value were sold.

The thing is, within a certain area, the demand for fruit has a limit, not to mention many customers bought many cards from Lin Mochen that would satisfy their needs of fruit for a whole year. The competitors’ website got few visitors and on some days they sold nothing at all.

With such an extremely bloody battle from the flanks, Lin Mochen slayed the business pattern he himself created.

The result of this small-scale business war?

The huge amount of fruit the competitors stocked up couldn’t be sold. Yet they could not wait either. In the end, they were all sold to Lin Mochen with an even lower, virtually dust-cheap price. In this way, Lin Monchen not only didn’t lose money, but also made a great profit. What’s more, the company he and his friends owned powerfully and absolutely monopolized the fruit market in New York City ever since then.

......

Monkey: “Also, weren’t there a few farm owners who betrayed him and went with the competitors? It’s said that at first Lin Mochen appeared as he didn’t care, but later after he monopolized the market, he specifically singled them out and blocked their sales all together. And weren’t there a few workers of his who got beaten up? Didn’t he get threatening letters? He paid a big money to hire the best attorneys and sent all the culprits and people behind them on to trial, who got very heavy sentences...In one word, those who offended him all got very miserable results -- He is someone who holds grudges and who is very crafty.”

Mu Hanxia: “......”