Booking the Courier Station for Five Hundred Packages! Old Xu: I've Never Seen a Shop Ship Five Hundred Orders a Day!

Thursday night, eight o'clock. In the rental apartment, Ma Le dialed the number, set his phone on the coffee table, and turned on speakerphone.

On the other end was a girls' dormitory. The background was incredibly noisy, the commotion of all six girls crammed into the receiver.

"Cousin, what did you say? Packing packages? How much per day?"

"Sixty, dinner included." Ma Le glanced at Lin Fan. Lin Fan nodded. "Next Wednesday night. Be there at eight and work through the night."

"All night?" Laughter broke out on the other end. "Packing packages can take all night? All six of us from the dorm will come. What about the boots? You've been promising me for half a month."

"There are boots. One pair each."

After the call ended, Ma Le picked up the phone and waved it around. "Sixty for one night, plus six pairs of shoes. Bro, are you hiring people or giving away money?"

Lin Fan did not answer.

Of those nineteen hundred pairs of shoes, he did not dare estimate too low how many would sell on the eleventh.

They were currently getting around thirty orders a day. Ten times that would be three hundred orders; fifty times would be fifteen hundred. He did not dare put a definite number on it, but there was one thing he remembered clearly.

For half a month after that day, courier stations across the country would be piled high like mountains. Packages would clog the transit centers and stop moving. How many shops had been dragged under by the words "slow shipping"?

No matter how many orders came in, if they could not ship them out, they were not orders—they were bad reviews. Their five-diamond shop had accumulated over five thousand reviews in more than half a year. One week could wipe them all out.

So what they needed to handle these next few days was not selling, but shipping.

The goods had already been sorted by size. Three things remained.

They needed enough packing materials, enough people, and most importantly, enough vehicles that day.

He got off work early on Friday afternoon. Instead of going back to the apartment complex, he rode directly to the courier station at the intersection.

The storefront was small. The room was piled with that day's parcels, and a man in his fifties was squatting on the floor attaching shipping labels, sleeve protectors covering his arms.

"You're Old Xu, right? I'm the one from the apartment complex ahead, the one selling boots."

"Oh, yeah. I remember your packages, twenty or thirty a day." Old Xu looked up. "What, you need to increase the volume?"

"Next Wednesday, the eleventh." Lin Fan squatted down so they were at eye level. "For my packages that day, charge me three-fifty each. Send two vehicles to pick them up at my garage door that day. From the twelfth to the fifteenth, one trip a day."

The tape in Old Xu's hand stopped.

"Three-fifty." He rolled the words around in his mouth. "Kid, three-fifty is the rate I give customers shipping more than three hundred packages a day. My station only takes in around two hundred packages a day for the whole area, and your one shop is asking me for three-fifty?"

"On the eleventh, I'll ship more than three hundred."

"How many?"

"Shoot for a thousand."

Old Xu laughed so hard the tape fell from his hand.

"I've been picking up packages around here for six years." He picked up the tape and pointed at the pile of parcels by the door with one finger. "Last month, some guy selling pants told me he could ship eight hundred orders a day and asked me to reserve a vehicle in advance. I sent a vehicle over, and by nightfall he had nineteen packages. I've never seen a shop ship five hundred orders in one day."

"Not seeing it doesn't stop you from making money." Lin Fan pulled five hundred-yuan bills from his pocket and spread them over Old Xu's greasy desk. "A deposit. Three-fifty, and you send the vehicles. If I don't ship five hundred orders on the eleventh, I'll make up the difference at four-fifty per package. I'll cover the cost of the extra vehicles."

Old Xu stared at the five bills for two seconds, shoved aside the parcels on the floor, and stood up.

"You're an interesting one."

"Reserve the vehicles. Don't tell me you have none when the time comes."

"I'll reserve them for you." Old Xu put the money in a drawer and tore off a receipt. "I want to see how many you can ship that day. But let me make this clear: everyone online will be buying things that day, and packages from all over the city will be flooding into the station. My two vehicles leave once the time passes. If you haven't finished packing your goods, I won't wait."

"I'll finish."

After leaving the courier station, he detoured to an engraving shop.

A rubber stamp cost fifteen yuan. It contained only the sender information: Ma as the surname, an address, and a phone number. Not one extra character.

The owner asked what he was engraving it for. Lin Fan said it was for stamping shipping labels.

The owner said, "Then you must have a lot of labels to stamp."

On the way back, he made another detour through the wholesale market. Two thousand waterproof courier bags at thirty-five cents each came to seven hundred yuan. Two large boxes of packing tape cost one hundred and twenty. He could not carry them alone, so he had the shop deliver them to the entrance of the apartment complex.

When Ma Le got off work that night and entered the garage, he stopped dead.

Two stacks of bags stood in the corner, taller than a person.

"Two thousand?"

"Two thousand."

"Bro, you're selling nineteen hundred pairs of shoes, and you bought two thousand bags." Ma Le braced one hand against the doorframe. "You're planning to put one pair in each bag and sell every last pair, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Ma Le opened his mouth but could not find the words. He turned around and moved some stools over.

That night, the two of them sat in the garage stamping labels.

They had carried back stacks upon stacks of blank shipping labels from Old Xu's place—two thousand in total, all with the sender section blank. If they wrote them one by one on the eleventh, just filling out the sender information would take half the night.

Press the rubber stamp into the inkpad, then stamp it onto the label. One per second.

By the time Ma Le had stamped three hundred, his wrist was sore. He shook it as he said this work was more exhausting than carrying boxes.

"It won't be exhausting once we get to that day."

"It'll be even more exhausting that day."

By eleven that night, all two thousand labels were stamped, tied into ten bundles, and stuffed into the cardboard box by the garage entrance.

At noon the next day, he called Wenzhou.

The moment Factory Director Ye heard it was him, his voice immediately perked up. He said the goods were being kept for him, untouched.

"Factory Director Ye, the deadline for the remaining thousand pairs has arrived, but I can't turn the money over these next couple of days." Lin Fan spoke directly. "I'll transfer two thousand yuan first as a deposit. I'll pay you the rest by mid-November, not a cent short. Please give me a few more days."

"Come on, I thought it was something serious." The other man laughed. "Pay whenever it's convenient. The goods are in my warehouse; they're not going anywhere."

After a pause, Factory Director Ye added something else.

"There is something I should tell you. It's strange—over the past two days, two groups came asking about women's short boots with fur cuffs. They asked in great detail, asking whose warehouse around here still had stock. I didn't say a word. I told them my factory had been shut down for more than half a year and that I ran out of stock long ago."

Lin Fan held the receiver, his eyes settling on the window.

They had come even faster than he expected.

"Factory Director Ye, keep telling them that."

"Don't worry. I won't say one word more."

Sunday afternoon, four o'clock. Six students entered the garage.

They chattered away, saying the place was huge, there were so many boxes, and asking if they could pick out a pair of shoes first.

Lin Fan explained the three steps.

One person would stay at the computer and read out the orders, reporting a size with every order. Two people would take shoes from the stacks of boxes, two would bag and seal them, and the last person would attach the labels.

"Everyone does one job. Don't have one person pack an order from beginning to end." He opened a bundle of bags. "If one person packs one order, six people are just six people. Break the work apart, and six people become twelve."

They tested it for half an hour. The first round was a mess: the person reading the orders went too fast, and the ones fetching shoes could not find the sizes in the boxes. In the second round, he switched Ma Le to the computer. Ma Le paused after each order and waited for a response before reading the next one.

By the third round, it ran smoothly.

Twenty-four packages in ten minutes.

Lin Fan ran the numbers through his head. About one hundred and forty an hour. More than five hundred in four hours. Six people packing from eight to midnight could finish five hundred.

If they got fifteen hundred orders that day, those six alone would have to pack until noon the next day.

Not enough.

But there was no need to panic yet. How many orders would actually come in that day—the trend over the next day or two would tell him first.

They wrapped up at four-thirty. He pulled six pairs from the stack by the door, three pairs of size thirty-six and three pairs of size thirty-seven. Each of the six girls carried a shoebox.

"I'll pay cash on the eleventh. Sixty each," he told them. "Be here at eight that night. The garage gets cold at night, so bring a thick coat. I'll provide a late-night meal in the middle."

"You'll really pay sixty for one night of packing?" His cousin hugged the shoebox to her chest. "Handing out flyers downstairs from our dorm only pays thirty a day."

"Sixty."

The six of them left, their voices echoing halfway up the stairwell.

Ma Le squatted on the floor gathering the bags, then looked up at him.

"Bro, six pairs of shoes plus wages for six people—that's over five hundred yuan gone just like that. What if that day is like usual and we only get thirty or so orders? The two of us could pack them in ten minutes, and those six come over just to sit around eating sunflower seeds?"

"Then let them eat sunflower seeds."

Ma Le pulled down the garage door, locked it, and went upstairs.

On the night of the eleventh, there would be six people in the garage, two thousand bags in the corner, Old Xu's two vehicles at the intersection, and two thousand labels with the sender information already stamped.

If all of it turned out to be unnecessary, he would accept losing those five hundred-plus yuan.

If it was not unnecessary, then it depended on how many people in that flood would type the three words "snow boots" into the search bar.