Summer 2014
The business is going well.
We have three full-time employees, myself, and a few part-timers. Xiao Lan has become a strength. She reliably makes the lemon cakes and
brownies, can make the muffins and in a pinch, can shepherd the bread through
the baking.
We have gone through a number of bakers. Peter lasted one year, then came ‘Jean’. She was also from the Xuzhou district, as was
Peter, and had also worked for the bakery chain 85°.
Jean was temperamental.
She was gentle but sensitive, an introvert. At first I thought she didn’t have the
strength to handle the stresses that tight schedules and multitasking
demand. I had that talk with her, put
her on notice, and she rallied. She
proved me wrong. But in the end she
still preferred baking cakes to bread. My
extroverted nature also wore her down.
She left after six months, to get married and move to Nanjing. This was an arranged marriage, by parents who
decided she was too old to hold off for Mr. Right.
Next came Julie, Zhang Yu Ling. A mother of two, ages 3 and 8. I don’t know what her work history was. Rachel and Xiao Lan interviewed her, and gave
me to understand that she would not be running off to Xuzhou or somewhere for
long holidays.
Julie is the salt of the earth. A hard worker, a fast talker, alert to her
surroundings. She would do her work and
look to alleviate me from my hard chores.
She was the one who would remember to water the plants. She quickly learned to make very good
bread. I tried to always make sure
she had a part time assistant to help with the washing up and restocking. She didn’t always get that, though, and
rather gave in to their begging to learn to bake. Not the bread, but the rest. She was still doing too much of the washing and restocking.
By the second summer business was solid. We had a solid core of regular, Chinese,
customers and new ones were always coming to check things out. It felt like the walls were growing smaller,
as we were buying our food supplies bulk online. It was getting harder and harder to store the
bags of flour, raisins, nuts, chocolate stuffs, milk powder, and packaging for
product.
The tea shop, two doors down, became available. Although business wasn’t so good that I had a
lot of extra money in the bank, it was certainly covering all our
expenses. Customers were regularly
trying to squeeze into our small space to sit down and have coffee with their
goodies. I felt it was time to
expand. I would have preferred the shop
immediately next door, but the knitting shopkeeper seemed impermeable to
changes in fortune. No matter how the
business was, she kept the doors open. I
presumed her husband was well-heeled and liked her to keep busy. They had no children.
I had to borrow money to secure the shop. Summertime was when my home and shop rents
came due. After paying them, there just
wasn’t enough to also pay rent and transfer fee for the new space. A gentle lady, an old friend to the bakery, DuoDuo, came and offered the money.
That was in August, the same month that a young cat perched
on the bakery windowsill and screeched for hours until I let her in. Within 24 hour she went into labor and gave
us seven kittens. DuoDuo is also a great
pet lover, so this seemed auspicious to us.
We moved into the new space, keeping the old space just
for baking. The new space has 150 sq
meters. We could sit 20 at tables, and
still had a small front room as a salon.
Customers appreciated the space to just sit and visit for a
while. We built up the sandwich
business, even advertising on meituan.
We had brunch on Sunday mornings, popular with a small group of
foreigners.
All the time, I was trying to find a cook to take over the
second kitchen, in the new space. I
wanted to offer suppers of simple meals, and pizza, American style. Sandwiches, soups, stews. But I could not find the right person.
We took on a second baker, xiao zhang. He had 6 years baking experience. Of course, he preferred the sweet stuff, but
I also required him to make breads. He
worked the second shift, 12 – 9, and I wanted him to start complex breads to be
made the next day. [he was not really
interested in that, as it turned out] I
thought he could really teach us some stuff, so it was important to hire
him. But he wanted 5,000 rmb. I persuaded him to accept 4,000. But then I had to raise Julie’s salary to the
same, because she is the lead baker. This
put a heavy burden on our budget.
In the end, he did not pull his weight and after six months
he left.
We peaked at a steady gross revenue of 30,000 over the spring
months. All looked good. I was feeling overworked, and still wanted to
find a manager and a good cook.
Then the construction began for the subway. There would be two subway stations serving
us, at the major intersections north and south of our mall. Between those intersections the northbound
bus had three stops. Two were
eliminated, though the one on our block remained. Traffic was heavily impacted. It was then that I learned that a lot of my
customers drove to our shop for their breads.
Because they stopped coming.
There was a large chain supermarket across the street from
us, in the MoiYi mall. A large chain
appliance store, Gome, was next to that.
Those two packed up and moved away.
Just south of us there was a large chain high-end Mall department store called
Golden Eagle. It closed, all the vendors
failed to renew their rental contracts.
You get the picture.
Road construction can bring commerce to its knees.
And so our sales plummeted.
I was getting deeper and deeper into red ink.
DuoDuo called in her loan.
We had one last bash, a Thanksgiving Dinner with about 18
guests. It was a success, and great
fun. But after that I had to make a
bitter decision.
In January I called in a contractor to build a second story
in the original bakery. Then I started
moving stuff out of the Café and back into the bakery. I put up the larger space for rent.
The landlord was willing to take it back. I had paid rent until April. If he got a tenant, he would refund some rent
money. But then I realized that if I
found a renter myself, I could get back some of my investment through the
Chinese tradition of a Transfer Fee. I
had paid 26,000 transfer fee when I took the café space from the tea shop. It had a toilet, and two rooms in the back
served by a hallway across the back. The
wood paneling on the wall, all the cabinet space, was valuable to me and in
reasonably good condition. I thought it
attractive, although later critics would say it was inappropriate for a coffee
shop. I thought I was getting a good deal at 26,000 rmb. I tried to negotiate them down unsuccessfully. When it was my turn to sell, I came up at the wrong end of the stick.
By the time the new renters took over, and negotiated my
transfer fee down to a mere 20,000 rmb, there was not much rent due back to
me. But at least my financial obligation
was unloaded.
It had been stressful, exhausting, to staff the café. Mostly college students applied for the work,
the training was ongoing, the turnover frequent.
This brings me back to Grandma’s Nook’s roots. With the addition of the loft I had also
partitioned the bakery to allow just a small shop area in front. I did not put much effort into decorating
it. By then I was broke and burned out.
One day Craig came to visit us. He was opening an Australian themed café bar
in Xin Bei. He casually mentioned that I
should have a cabinet along the wall for my product. It was a ‘duh’ moment.
My health deteriorated in February. I suffered from severe edema. Through complicated circumstances, my medical
care was sporadic, not consistent. It
took many, many weeks to finally heal.
During that time I made the decision to retire, for real. Meanwhile, I did not have the strength to spend much time in the bakery. This apparently upset Julie greatly. Perhaps she did not believe the extent of my illness, or perhaps she thought I should have hired temporary help. I don't know, because she refused to share her thoughts with me. She would always say, 'it's none of my business, you are the owner.' This frustrated me endlessly.
I could not bear the thought of the bakery and its unique
products going extinct. For one, I
myself still needed the bread for my own consumption. So I discreetly advertised the business for
sale. Not only the shop, but the
business.
One of those who spoke up was the baker, Julie. I felt she did not have the business acumen
to make a success of it. She also didn’t
have the capital. In fairness I tried to
have the conversation with her. But by
then, for some reason, her respect for me had severely disintegrated and we
could not have a conversation. Every
word from her mouth was scorched with anger.
I said if she really wanted to make a go of it I would defer the transfer
fee, but she’d have to step up production in the following months in order to
have enough money to also pay the rent.
Then she said she had money for that.
I thought, wait, either you have money or you don’t. My fee comes first. But I held my tongue. We talked a little about the plans. I asked if she would try to open the upstairs
for customer table. She was saying she
would buy sweet goods from other shops to expand the product line. But what about the bread, I wanted to know. She said she didn’t agree with my business
model. I tried to tell her that she had
to agree, we needed to talk it out, because I wasn’t just turning over the
shop, but the business.
It went downhill from there.
Since we couldn’t agree, I kept looking for a buyer. She had already spread the word that she was
buying it, and so now she lost face and became even more derisive of me. One guy came to talk. After he left saying he'd come in the following week to observe and learn before we signed a contract, I asked Julie if she would stay
on to help him as baker. She said she
would not. She turned in her one-month notice. So there it was. Two years of training that I had invested in
her, and she was going to walk away.
Then Peter stepped up, my first baker/apprentice. He wanted to take over the business. He couldn’t do it right away, but in a couple
of months. He was still living in
Xuzhou, and planning his wedding.
Eventually he and his bride moved back to Changzhou, and took over the
business. I promised I would help him as
much or as little as he would like. He asked Julie to stay on until he could move back here. She told him 'yes', but after a month she left anyway. I was then the sole person in the bakery, for about three weeks. Somehow I survived, risking closing the business on days I could not cope (still recuperating from the illness). Peter finally arrived, and said he would take it over from here. Go, he said, rest.
And so I looked around me, beginning to think in terms of
being retired. What shape would that
take? The most pressing need was to
improve my physical condition. All the
stress over the previous year had contributed to my putting back the weight I
had lost two years earlier. I was too
heavy. Clothes didn’t fit, or fit very
snuggly. I am tired all the time. So job #1 is to begin walking
I am happy that the new Catholic Church in QingFeng park has
agreed to offer mass in English each week.
So this is a new page in my life, having a church family again.
The future is open. I
have considered and discarded thoughts about returning to the States. I have a good and affordable life here. Can’t see any benefits in returning to the
States. The Chinese puzzle at this, assuming my family would want me back into their fold. Not so. I feel more taken care of here than I ever would in the States. I enjoy minor celebrity, thanks to media coverage over the years of this eccentric energetic old foreign lady who decided on a change of career instead of retiring. My apartment complex has a delightful large garden with car-free paths for walking with the dog and cat. My life is good. That is, as long as I have access to good bread.
