Trivialities

When it came to his mother, Princess Clémentine, Ferdinand knew when to give in. He knew better than to try to reason with her, or she could chatter on all day!

As a result, Ferdinand got a thorough scolding and was dragged off to several dull aristocratic banquets before it was finally over!

Still, he did get something out of it. At least he gained a talented man from his mother: Franz Kafka. Does that name sound familiar? It was the same as that of an Austrian Jewish novelist.

Of course, this wasn't the same person. This Franz Kafka was a Hungarian man in his forties who had long managed Princess Clémentine's personal estate. He was quite capable.

Ferdinand knew him and was aware of his abilities. After wearing Princess Clémentine down with persistent pleading, Ferdinand got her to lend him Franz for a while.

Ferdinand planned to put him in charge of the department store. As the name suggested, Ferdinand was opening a supermarket, but the limitations of the times meant that supermarkets couldn't yet be entirely separated from department stores. That made the personal abilities of senior managers all the more important!

In the nineteenth century, the market economy wasn't very developed, and family businesses were still the norm. Talent didn't move around much, so finding skilled people meant picking up whoever had been overlooked.

In 1881, Austria had just over thirteen thousand university students. At first glance, that seemed like quite a lot, but on closer inspection, only two or three thousand students graduated each year. They were spread across all sorts of disciplines, and once you narrowed it down to management, there were only a pitiful eighty or so.

After excluding those who were nobles or merchants themselves, hardly anyone was actually looking for a job.

University students of the time were the true cream of the crop. Government departments and major financial groups were all scrambling to hire them, and most had jobs lined up before they even graduated.

After comparing the situation with his own prospects, Ferdinand had to put his plan to recruit from universities on hold and settle for training people himself.

The first thing Franz Kafka did for Ferdinand was recruit a team, but things didn't go smoothly.

One day, Franz came over and gave Ferdinand a nobleman's bow. "Your Highness Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Duke of Saxony, I, Franz Kafka, offer you my greetings."

"Hmm, you can call me Your Highness or Duke. The full title is far too cumbersome. Franz, what brings you here today?" Ferdinand said casually.

"I'm sorry, Your Highness. I won't be able to complete the task you gave me on schedule," Franz said, looking troubled.

"What? You only had to recruit a little over a thousand people. How could you not manage it?" Ferdinand asked, baffled.

His opinion of Franz had already dropped a few notches. He had given him half a month to recruit, and less than half that time had passed. Now Franz was already saying it was difficult. Didn't he know to find a way to solve the problem?

"Your Highness, I'm afraid I can't meet your requirements. So far, I've recruited only 382 people. Since yesterday morning, hardly anyone has applied. There probably aren't that many highly educated people still looking for work in Vienna," Franz Kafka explained.

After a pause, Franz suggested to Li Mu, "Your Highness, perhaps you could lower your standards for the remaining positions. That would also let us reduce some of the salaries and save money without affecting the supermarket's operations."

Ferdinand's minimum requirement for recruits was a secondary-school diploma. Because the salaries were generous, he had filled the first hundred positions very quickly, and that had led him to overlook the fact that secondary-school graduates were highly educated people in this era.

A secondary-school graduate could easily find a decent job back then. Their credentials were worth even more than those of graduates from top universities like 985 and 211 in later generations.

After hearing Franz's explanation, Ferdinand's anger faded. This was a problem of his own making.

He silently reminded himself to remember the lesson and not bring the assumptions of later generations into this era. Making a fool of himself would be a small matter; one wrong move could leave him capsized in a ditch, and that would be disastrous!

Admitting a mistake and correcting it was one of Ferdinand's strengths. Since Franz's suggestion made sense, there was no reason to reject it.

"Mr. Franz, that's an excellent suggestion. I'll leave the rest to you. Go ahead and handle it as you see fit!" Ferdinand said, his tone far more courteous this time.

The supermarket had its management staff, but finding accountants was still a headache. There were no computers in this era, and all the bookkeeping had to be done by hand.

The workload was considerable, and every supermarket needed reliable accounting staff. Ferdinand would have a hard time finding so many people at once.

At the five supermarkets he'd opened earlier, the accountants had all been put to work after temporary training. They could just about keep the books, but they had no real professional qualifications.

Just thinking about it gave him a headache. Taking Volvo stores global was clearly still a long way off!

But then he thought about the supermarkets' profits, and his spirits lifted again. The first Volvo supermarket had recouped its costs in its very first month of operation. The other four had only been open a short time, but they were profitable too.

The two aristocratic supermarkets were especially profitable. After all, nobles had far greater spending power, and the shops stocked nothing but high-end goods and offered first-rate service. Naturally, their prices were just a little higher than those elsewhere!

As expected, monopolies are the easiest way to make money, Ferdinand thought.

Still, he knew this good run would probably last six months at most. Once others entered the business, profits would surely fall.

After keeping an eye on things for another two months, he saw that the supermarkets were running smoothly and handed the department store's day-to-day management over to Franz.

Of course, he also promoted two of the earliest employees to serve as Franz's assistants. The supermarket business would certainly keep expanding, so how could he not prepare talent in advance?

The supermarket business was put on hold for the time being, but Ferdinand didn't get to relax. The profits were decent, but they were a drop in the bucket compared with what he planned to do in the future.

Thinking about Bulgaria, Ferdinand felt he still wasn't working hard enough. He was a transmigrator, after all—someone who had seen the big world. How could he be satisfied with a mere ten thousand or so pounds a month?

Of course, before he transmigrated, he would have been more than satisfied with a monthly income of over ten thousand pounds.

But everything was different now. He was a prince and a duke, and one day he would be the king of Bulgaria. How could he afford to have such narrow horizons?

Ferdinand envied the transmigrators who had come before him. They could come up with a few inventions and wind up with tens or even hundreds of millions in assets. But when it came to him, all he could do was run a little business.

The Kohary Family did have assets worth tens of millions of pounds, but that was only on paper. The vast estates and castles couldn't possibly be liquidated—not unless he wanted to be cast out of aristocratic society!

Well, the Kohary Family's wealth was only vast on paper. In reality, the family's investments and income from its estates brought in just over a million pounds a year!

After expenses, it could still save around two or three hundred thousand pounds a year, enough to make it a first-rate family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Ferdinand wasn't going to invent anything. He knew about things like attaching an eraser to a pencil, but Hyman had already patented that in 1867. There was nothing left for him to do.

Nylon stockings were even more ridiculous. Given the state of the chemical industry at the time, even if they could be made, they probably wouldn't cost less than gold—and whether anyone could wear them was another question!

Besides, were patent fees really so easy to collect in this era? Did he think capitalists were pushovers? Hadn't people been pelted with peanuts and sent flying in toy planes right here in this era?

Even if Ferdinand was a great noble, what difference would that make? People might not dare come after him directly, but he couldn't stop them from using his patents without permission!

Piracy couldn't be stamped out even in the twenty-first century, let alone the nineteenth!

Since patents weren't a viable path, Ferdinand finally decided to keep working on food, clothing, housing, and transportation. A grain-processing plant, for instance, would be a good idea.

The profit might be low, but even a mosquito's leg was meat! The grain could come from his own land, then go straight to the supermarkets once it had been processed. That would create a small supply chain and improve the business's resilience, too.

I found the wrong information earlier. It's been corrected now: primary-school graduates has been changed to secondary-school graduates. Austrian primary school lasted four years, and secondary school lasted eight. I mistakenly assumed primary school lasted six years. Sorry.

Thanks to Mantou and Aizen for the information, and to ms-cd for the timely reminder!