All Orders Across the Web Delayed for Ten Days; Su Qing: This Store Ships Faster Than the Twenty-Plus Stores in the Event Hall!

At nine o'clock on Monday morning, November 16, on the sixth floor, he opened the pending complaints. The entire screen was filled with the same category.

Logistics.

It was the same on the 3C side. Headphones had not arrived, card readers had not arrived, and one buyer had typed seventeen question marks in a row in the complaint box. The order had been placed last Wednesday. Today was the fifth day, yet the logistics status was still stuck at "collected."

He did not need to check how many packages had been backlogged across the entire web over those five days. Transfer hubs were piled to the ceiling. There were not enough vehicles or workers. Stores whose pages promised shipment within three days were actually delayed ten or twenty days. The curses would continue from this week until the end of the month. For anyone in the trade seventeen years later, this was the second thing that came to mind at the mention of Double Eleven.

The first was the sales that day. The second was the half month afterward.

He had only one thing to do today: make good on the promise his own store page owed.

As of last night, there were more than 3,800 pairs sold but not yet shipped. The date of the twentieth had been written on the page by him personally. When he wrote it, six students and two thousand bags stood below. The moment the words went up, there was no turning back.

Everything he had was laid out in front of him. Old Xu had made one run a day since the twelfth. The deposit was in the man's drawer, and the price of three yuan fifty had been agreed upon. There were still more than 1,200 pre-printed shipping labels left. The room in the west of the city had been sorted by size range, with sizes thirty-six and thirty-seven at the entrance. The thousand pairs from Ye's factory had arrived in Jianqiao on Saturday, been packed Saturday night, and sent out in two truckloads on Sunday. For the first batch, he had not exceeded the three-day deadline by even one day.

Only one thing was missing: goods.

If things went smoothly, he could make another profit on the side. It was not just packages that were backlogged across the web. Goods were too. These days, every vehicle in Hangzhou was busy delivering packages within the city. No one had spare capacity to run to Wenzhou. In the open spaces outside the five or six factories in the production area, goods should be piling up by now.

He had thought through that logic on Saturday night, but he had not told Ma Le.

A little after ten, a commotion broke out at the far end of the corridor.

A girl from the women's clothing team stood in the aisle holding a phone receiver. She said one store had not shipped a single order since the tenth, and buyers had taken their complaints from Wangwang to consumer protection, more than seventy a day. Someone replied, "That's nothing. I got over four hundred refund requests yesterday morning alone."

Zhou Bin stood in the aisle holding his thermos for a while, then went back to his desk to make a call. One of the major merchants under his watch had six trucks making runs every two hours, and even they were currently jammed in the city.

At eleven thirty in the morning, Su Qing came over from the women's clothing team with two sheets of paper in hand.

"Brother Zhou." She placed the papers on Zhou Bin's desk. "I pulled the logistics turnaround data for that case of mine."

"You're still working on that store?"

"I need to submit it for my performance review." Su Qing flipped over the top sheet. "Orders from the eleventh—the entire first batch was collected and shipped within three days. Among women's clothing stores today, it's in the fastest shipping tier. More than twenty stores from the event hall are below that tier. This store is above it."

Zhou Bin did not respond.

"There's something else I've never seen before." Su Qing pointed to the line below. "On the night of the eleventh, it stated right on its page that shipments would be split into two batches. The first batch within three days, the second before the twentieth. I went through the entire category. Not one other store dared put a date directly on its page. Everyone else wrote three days, then delayed for ten."

Several people in the team turned to look.

"What are you trying to say?" Zhou Bin screwed the lid onto his thermos.

"I'm saying the person behind this store already knew the next half month would turn out like this." Su Qing gathered up the papers. "Otherwise, he would not have written the twentieth on the page on the night of the eleventh."

Lin Fan had a price protection complaint about headphones open on his screen. He did not move a single line.

This time last week, this store had been a little shop sentenced to death in this building. This morning, everyone in the room was handling merchants with backlogged orders, while only that store's shipping speed was being used as a yardstick against the others.

And the person saying this was the one in the entire department who most wanted to pry this store open and see what was inside.

She was half right. It was not that he knew the next half month would be like this. He knew it would definitely be like this. The difference between those two statements was seventeen years.

Zhou Bin did not mention it over lunch in the cafeteria. At three in the afternoon, Zheng Haifeng called him into the meeting room for twenty minutes. When he came out, the stack of materials in his hands was even thicker.

At five thirty, after work, he rode his bike around to the entrance of the residential complex.

The door to the courier station would not even open. Packages were piled from inside the room all the way to the curb. Old Xu and two helpers were digging through them, with barely enough space to put their feet down.

"Little brother." Old Xu raised his head from the pile of cardboard boxes. "I still saved room in my truck for your packages today."

"Thanks for the trouble."

"What trouble?" Old Xu rolled up his sleeve cover. "Do you know what my days have been like lately? There are more than eight hundred other people's packages backed up at the station. Trucks from the transfer hub only come once every two days. People block my doorway every day to curse me out. Then after they're done cursing, they try to stuff me cigarettes so I'll send theirs first."

He reached out and slapped the side panel of the truck bed.

"Only your store—I haven't missed a single run."

"I've got a deposit with you."

"To hell with the deposit." Old Xu laughed. "I'm after your volume. Your store alone is worth half a month of packages in my whole area. If I don't dispatch a truck for you, who am I supposed to dispatch one for?"

He took the cigarette from his lips and asked the same question from last week again.

"Is there actually a factory behind your store?"

"The factory isn't mine." Lin Fan squatted down to help stack the scattered packages back onto the pile. "I buy ready stock from Wenzhou. Whoever has inventory sitting in their warehouse, I buy from them."

Old Xu clicked his tongue.

"Ready stock." He rolled the two words around. "With luck like yours, I haven't seen it once in six years."

When he returned to the garage after seven, Ma Le was dragging the last two bags toward the entrance. Only three of the six students remained. The rest had left, saying they would come back tomorrow afternoon.

He opened the review section in the backend and glanced through it.

More than 2,300 reviews had come in over three days. On the first screen alone, eight mentioned shipping. Some said that out of everything they bought on Double Eleven, only this store's goods had arrived. Some said other stores were still stuck at "collected." Mixed in was one complaint, cursing that the second batch would have to wait until the twentieth.

He left that review there and did not appeal it.

The page did say the twentieth. The buyer was cursing the words he himself had written. He accepted that complaint.

At 9:10, his phone rang. It was a Wenzhou number.

Wu's voice was lower than last time. He first asked a few questions about how the goods had sold, circled around for a while, then got to the point.

"Boss Ma, there's something I need to tell you. On the night of the twelfth, Lei came to my factory."

"To inspect the goods?"

"He inspected them all night." Wu clicked his tongue. "The kid stationed at the factory went through his notebook from start to finish, checking every day against every page. I called the workshop manager, warehouse keeper, and accountant who handled invoices into the office and had them explain everything. Before he left, he asked me whether anyone had come asking about stock of ribbed short socks in October."

Lin Fan said nothing.

"I told him no."

It was only three words over the phone, but they landed with considerable weight.

In mid-October, he had sat in Wu's factory with twenty thousand yuan on his back for an afternoon. He had drunk tea, asked for four pieces of insider information, and received the samples Wu had sent. If there was anyone in the area most likely to connect Boss Ma from Hangzhou with that thirty-nine-yuan listing, it was this man.

He had not made the connection. Or perhaps he had, and chose not to say anything.

"Boss Wu, I'll remember this favor."

"What favor? I'm calling because I have something to tell you." Wu lowered his voice. "Lei's trucks haven't come to collect goods for four days. I've got more than four thousand pairs piled in my yard. All the trucks in Hangzhou are delivering packages inside the city, and he's jammed up too. His deposit is tied up there, the goods are tied up here, and I need to pay my workers by the end of the month."

"How many?"

"Three thousand pairs. I quoted Lei twenty-two. For you, twenty." Wu spoke quickly. "I'll throw in another two hundred or so mismatched sizes I picked out. If you want them, take them away for five yuan a pair. Transfer the money to my personal account tonight. Tomorrow morning, I'll arrange a dedicated line myself through my cousin's logistics company. The invoice won't say ribbed short socks, and the shipment won't be loaded from my factory gate."

"You'll have it tonight."

"You're not going to ask why I dare spare them?"

"You've got more than four thousand pairs piled in your yard. I don't need to ask to know."

The man on the other end laughed, but it sounded somewhat dry.

Before hanging up, Wu added one more sentence.

"Lei left some words behind before he went. He said he would find out sooner or later which factory shipped this batch of goods. And once he found out, that factory could forget about surviving in this business."

Lin Fan thanked him and hung up.

Behind that rusty iron gate in southern Wenzhou, the factory was still operating, the dog was still skinny, and the receipt stamped with fingerprints was still pressed inside Factory Director Ye's drawer.

The more than sixty-three thousand yuan he could withdraw from Alipay today had been clicked out one order at a time by the first batch of buyers. He kept none of it for himself, transferring sixty-one thousand to Wenzhou. The remaining two thousand plus the four thousand on his card was all the cash he had on hand.

Three thousand two hundred pairs, plus the thousand pairs from Ye's factory, against the debt of more than 3,800 pairs. The shortfall of around six hundred pairs was entirely in sizes thirty-six and thirty-seven. Wu's mismatched-size batch had plenty of size thirty-nine and forty.

He opened the backend and filtered out orders for size thirty-nine and above.

Six hundred and twenty-seven orders.

He sent messages through Wangwang one by one. Those willing to switch to size thirty-six or thirty-seven would wait for the second batch. Those willing to refund would get their money back that day. For those willing to do neither, he would give them a scarf for free.

Ma Le shouted from the entrance for him to come down and move goods.

"Wait a little." His hands did not stop. "These six hundred-plus people need an answer tonight."