Traveling back to 1977

Chapter 116 Buying Chicks
Some people come, some people go.

After Chen Fan noticed that Jiang Lili had put on a headscarf, she seemed to raise her head a little higher and look around curiously with both eyes.

As she walked, she suddenly pointed ahead and exclaimed, "Oh, there are chicks for sale over there!"

Chen Fan looked in the direction she was pointing and saw an old man putting down a pair of baskets, then taking a small stool from the winnowing basket covering one of the baskets and sitting down.

I can't see any chicks.

Jiang Lili: "That's how they sell chicks. They line the basket with straw, put the chicks underneath, and cover them with a winnowing basket on top."

Chen Fan immediately strode forward, "Let's go."

They rushed to the stall, and the old man looked up at the two of them and chuckled, "Buying chicks? Buy more chicks and raise them, and you'll have a 'chicken butt bank'—the more you buy, the more you earn."

Chicken-butt bank?
Chen Fan blinked, instantly understanding what it meant, and couldn't help but chuckle.

It's actually quite a vivid analogy. First, you spend money to buy chicks, and when the chicks grow up, they can lay eggs. Each egg costs 4 cents a day, so 10 eggs would cost 4 cents. The more you buy, the more you earn.

As the old man spoke, he had already taken down the two winnowing baskets. Sure enough, underneath were chicks lined with straw, each one looking like a fluffy ping-pong ball, crammed into the basket. Chen Fan's eyes lit up at the sight.

Oh my, my girlish heart is fluttering!
He immediately reached out to grab it.

The old man quickly stopped him, saying, "Don't rush, don't rush. This little chick is very delicate. It will be frightened if the temperature is a little too high or too low. Rub your hands together to warm them up first, and then pick them out slowly."

He paused for a moment, then said, "Why don't you just tell me which one you want, and I'll pick them out for you one by one."

Chen Fan was taken aback. Are chicks really that delicate?
How am I going to take it back later?
Jiang Lili squatted down next to him and whispered, "Later, we need some straw to put on the eggs, then put the chicks on the straw, and then cover them with a cloth to keep out the wind."

Chen Fan looked at the egg basket. Hundreds of small eggs were stacked flat in the rectangular basket, taking up only a third of the space. With straw on top, it would definitely be enough to hold chicks.

He then turned to Jiang Lili and smiled, "You're really smart."

Jiang Lili chuckled. "It's not that I'm smart, it's that you've never lived in the countryside."

Next, we started selecting chicks.

But before Chen Fan could make a move, Jiang Lili asked, "Grandpa, how much is one of your chicks?"

The old man held up two fingers, "The same price as the supply and marketing cooperative, 2 mao (0.2 yuan)."

Jiang Lili frowned slightly. "Could you make it cheaper?"

The old man chuckled and looked at the two men, saying, "I didn't overcharge at all. This chicken wasn't hatched at home; I bought it from a chicken vendor. I'm just earning a little money from my hard work."

Chen Fan's eyes widened. "There are chicken vendors too?"

Not to mention him, even Jiang Lili looked at the old man in disbelief. In the three years she had lived in Lujiawan, she had only ever seen people carrying baskets and selling chicks from village to village. She really didn't know that anyone was actually doing a business of selling chicks.

The old man looked at him and said matter-of-factly, "Why not? As long as you submit a report to the production team and they issue an export certificate, you can go out and sell chicks."

"You need to buy work points to go out, and those work points are expensive. You can only earn 10 work points a day, which isn't even worth 50 cents. But if you buy work points from the production team, it costs 8 yuan for 5 days. You need to buy work points to go out." Hearing this, Chen Fan found it amazing and pressed for more information, asking, "Doesn't that cost more than 1.5 yuan a day? Can you earn that back by selling chicks?"

The old man looked around and, seeing that no one was coming to buy his chicks, decided to chat with the young man, laughing and joking.

"That depends on how you make money. Those big chicken dealers go directly to the hatcheries of production teams they know, buy chickens from them, and then take the train to sell them in other places. They sell at least a thousand chickens at a time, which takes four or five days. They can make 20 or 30 yuan per trip. After deducting the cost of buying work points, they can still make about 2 yuan. That's more than 80 yuan a month, which is more than what a factory worker makes."

He shook his head again, "However, the more you earn, the more you lose. If you can't sell them all in four or five days, the remaining chicks will basically not survive. Or if the weather is bad, a thunderstorm can kill 7 or 8 out of 10 chickens, and you'll lose everything."

Moreover, this line of work is easy to be disliked. These chicks have a smell. Even if you have the production team's export certificate, the guesthouse won't let you stay. When you take a bus, if you don't offer the driver two packs of cigarettes, the driver won't let you get on the bus.

Once they arrived at the market, they would carry their wares to the market and hawk them, having to appease the market management office and the market supervision team, and win over all sorts of people.

In particular, the money spent on buying work points couldn't be skimped on. Without proof from the production team, being caught meant going to a study session and being punished by the market inspectors.

At this point, he patted his pocket and chuckled, "The most important thing is that you can't have too little capital. If you don't have enough, you can't do this. I can only buy a hundred or so chickens from those big chicken dealers and go from village to village to earn some money for food."

He paused for a moment, then looked at Jiang Lili and said, "I'm not afraid to tell you frankly, you can ask around, there are some things you can find out."

The big vendors usually buy chicks from the hatchery for 14 cents each, and they sell them to individual customers for 20 cents each. They even charge us small vendors 18 cents each. I only make 2 cents per chick. And even then, I still have to bear the loss of any dead chicks. If you try to lower my price any further, I'll have worked for nothing.

Even Jiang Lili felt embarrassed to haggle after hearing this, and just murmured, "Then could you give us some straw?"

The old man raised his head and sighed deeply. Then, looking at Chen Fan, he said with a face full of emotion, "Your wife is amazing! She's truly an exceptional homemaker!"

Upon hearing this, Jiang Lili blushed instantly, but thankfully her headscarf covered her face so it wasn't noticeable.

She struggled to say in a low voice, "No, no, we're not."

Chen Fan quickly waved his hand and laughed, "You've misunderstood, we're just friends."

The old man suddenly realized, "Oh, you're not married yet? Well, young man, you'd better hurry up, a wife like that is hard to find."

Seeing that he couldn't reason with him, Chen Fan simply pointed to the chicks and said, "Could you pick out a batch for me? I need 10 roosters and 10 hens."

Jiang Lili turned to look at him, "Why do you need so many roosters?"

Chen Fan leaned close to her ear and whispered, "Eat meat."

Jiang Lili was speechless. Hens were much more popular than roosters. Only a glutton would raise so many roosters to eat.

The old man had already started working. He first pulled a handful of straw and put it in Chen Fan's basket, carefully arranging it before starting to pick up the chicks. "There's a trick to picking chicks. You have to pinch their bottoms. If their bottoms aren't very soft, you can't buy them. To use a human analogy, it's like 'their bottoms haven't turned yellow yet.' The ones I'm giving you are all handpicked by myself. I guarantee they're all top-notch."

While he was talking, he selected 10 roosters and 10 hens.

Chen Fan looked at the chirping chicks in his basket and was extremely happy with them.

He quickly took out a piece of cloth from his bag and gently covered the basket, then paid 4 yuan before leaving with Jiang Lili, carrying the basket.

(End of this chapter)