October 1, 1648, Port Merlin, Merlin County.

Agnelli had just finished mending the bottom of a pot for a woman from the Ming Kingdom of the East, and now he was ready to pack his things and board the ship to his next destination, Hekou Township, Zhenhai County, to join Gao Jinzhong, who had returned earlier. He has already made up his mind not to be a tinker anymore, because this business is more hard and he doesn't make much money, and now he wants to try his luck with Gao Jinzhong, an old comrade-in-arms, and work with him to make a fortune in the machine-made flour business?

But before leaving, he didn't mind visiting an old acquaintance of his in the village, a small trader who used to travel with him. This small trader from the Ming Kingdom in the East, originally said to be an employee of a small silk shop, after immigrating to the East Coast, he gave up his status as a farmer (he could own arable land) and applied for a trader license instead, and started a small trader business in all directions.

His activities were initially confined to the port of Merlin. In that difficult time of starting a business, he used to be able to eat only one meal a day, and then carry a tattered little basket and walk the streets to do business. He sells a limited number of goods, but this has prevented him from winning the praise of his neighbors with his passion, honesty and sincerity. At that time, Agnelli was also doing business in the area of Port Merlin, which was still called Fort Merlin at that time, and the two of them helped each other and had a good relationship.

By the time Port Merlin was officially established in early 1641, the fellow's "equipment" had gone from a small basket to a big baggage; And when Merlin Harbor was withdrawn from the fort and established as a town, and entered the channel of accelerated development, his "equipment" was upgraded again to a horse and three or four burdens.

Year 1644. When Qishan Township was established. Agnelli saw him again. At that time, he already had a mini-horse-drawn van, and the scale of his business had reached a new level. By the time the county of Merlin was officially established in January 1647, this fellow was already a well-known merchant in the neighborhood, and at the request of some old patrons in the county, he began to open a store in the county town specializing in all kinds of fine goods (dyed cloth, calico, fine wool, fine furs, imported liquor, whale oil products, etc.), which were specially used by the ladies of the city's middle-class (there were no strictly wealthy people on the east coast).

A few years ago, Agnelli had the privilege of meeting a veteran cloth dealer who publicly thanked his customers who had taken care of his business and then announced that he was no longer going to the market or to sell in all directions. Instead, we will open a fixed store in the county, and I hope that everyone will continue to support Yunyun. His friend has now embarked on this path, and to be honest, Agnelli is still more envious.

Far from it. Agnelli's friend's store happened to be in staggered competition with the state-run stores, which mainly sold cheap daily necessities, so business was not bad. After all, the main purpose of the state-run store is not to make money, it also undertakes a lot of government functions, that is, to stabilize prices, etc., and will bear some policy losses every year, and most of the daily necessities sold are ordinary cotton cloth, salted fish, oil, salt, sauce and vinegar, and there is basically no competition between the two.

Speaking of which, I have to say one more thing. Since the opening of the train and the emergence of state-run stores, the number of hawkers in the vicinity of Port Merlin has begun to decline sharply. Even the regular bazaars were much more depressed, and the peasants preferred to buy from the cheap and high-quality state stores than to buy second-hand goods from the vendors. Today, there are still mobile hawkers in some remote villages, but with the development of the country's transportation infrastructure, these hawkers will eventually be ruthlessly eliminated from the market, just as Agnelli was driven from one place to another by train. The development of the East Coast is really fast! The transformation of society is also too dizzying!

The disintegration of village or town markets has also led to the establishment of a large number of specialized markets. Agnelli vaguely heard that in the capital Dongfang County and Ping'an County, the center of northern industry, there have been a kind of super-large stores called "department stores", and everything that can be bought in some small private shops (most of them are privately run by craftsmen) can be bought in one trip to those department stores, which is very convenient and fast.

Moreover, it is said that going shopping at department stores is also a very fashionable and showy thing now. These shops often employ dozens of clerks, many of whom are bankrupt petty traders, who are hospitable to every customer, who has a wide range of goods, and who buys ten-dollar goods as those who buy one-dollar goods. In particular, the state-run No. 1 Department Store in Dongfang County, the capital, is said to sell hundreds of goods, and there is no store in the whole country or even the entire New World that can match it.

The emergence of specialized or general stores (department stores) has replaced the functions of vendors who travel all over the world, and it has also changed people's inherent consumption habits. The continuous construction and improvement of railways, roads, and canals has played an unparalleled role in accelerating this trend, and even in the county towns of the six coastal counties, many people no longer sew clothes at home, but have turned to custom-order or purchase from specialized or comprehensive stores.

"God testifies that it is too hard to live on the East Coast. According to the words of the newspapers, it is the acceleration of social transformation and the faster pace of life, alas, but after all, it is much stronger than the old continent. Here I am free to do a lot of things, and I also have unlimited possibilities to live a decent life through my own efforts. Agnelli took the tinkling pot tinkering tool in his hand and walked down the street towards the front.

This is the hottest place in Meilin County. A stone bridge spans both sides of the Merlin River, and at either end of the bridge are two huge markets, one called the Farmers' Market and the other the Wholesale Cloth Market. As an important north-south transshipment node and the starting point for the coastal area to the inland hinterland (the Tongguò River system), the Port of Merlin naturally became a large cargo distribution center. Shopkeepers or traders in many towns and towns in the Yihe area and the Northwest Reclamation Bureau came to Meilin Port to buy goods and then find ways to ship them back for sale, which created a boom in some wholesale markets in the county.

At this time, the place where Agnelli stood was called the "Qiaodong Cloth Wholesale Market", and a large number of cloth salesmen or intermediaries searched the crowd for every potential customer with their sparkling eyes. Dressed in different colours, they were clearly divided into two camps, one specializing in all kinds of fabrics produced by the Dayuheji Qì textile factory, and the other specializing in the textile production of the Ping'an Weaving Factory from the north.

The means of competition are nothing more than cheap competition and all kinds of empty promises, of course, in the process, it is inevitable that there will be a black competitor, these are all due meanings, Agnelli has long been surprised. In the vicinity of the wholesale market, there are also some shops selling all kinds of textiles, some of which are very imposing, the windows are glass window cabinets, and the walls of the shops are even covered with gold leaf, which is very nouveau riche style.

The owners of these shops were originally small traders, but they were recruited by the two major textile factories to become agents and began to sell their finished products to these upstream manufacturers. Since this is a distribution center for goods, some astute and capable people quickly complete the original accumulation, and then take the goods directly from the factory to their own stores for sale. And after the competition became more and more fierce, they began to hire some salesmen to start soliciting customers outside to promote the goods in their stores, and this is how the business system developed.

Passing through the bustling Qiaodong Wholesale Market, Agnelli crossed the stone bridge to the farmers' market on the west side of the bridge. Unlike industrialized commodities such as cloth, the sales of farmers' markets have not changed significantly over the years, except for a few food items such as whale meat, salted fish, dried fruits, and shredded tobacco, which are shipped from afar, and the rest of the goods such as vegetables, fresh meat, poultry eggs, butter, and soy products are all locally produced.

Many years ago, it was a produce market, and farmers from the countryside regularly brought their goods to the market to sell. Today, the model has not changed much, except that the market has changed from open-air to roofed, and the sellers here are still the same people. Perhaps there are fewer direct producers and more businessmen who go to the countryside to buy peasant products and resell them, but the change in this trend is still extremely slow, far less rapid and drastic than the changes in the market for those industrial products.

The streets of the market are somewhat narrow, with a large number of horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians crowded among them. Port Merlin is home to the Southern Depot, a city where merchants or shopkeepers buy a high percentage of minivans, which they pull to collect produce and transport it back to their stores to sell.

Agnelli could smell the pungent smell of fish from some of the wagons from the merchants, who had gone to the fishing villages near Lake Milin to buy fresh or salted fish. Occasionally, there was some horse or cow dung on the ground, and Agnelli watched his feet carefully, for fear that he would be squeezed onto the cow dung by pedestrians.

A wagon transporting milk unexpectedly appeared on the street. The milk is produced in the nearby suburbs, and some of the cream even comes from horse farming villages in the East. The emergence of this new industry has benefited from the great development of transportation, and the vigorous construction of county roads and township roads, which has made logistics and transportation much more convenient than in the past, which has made milk, a commodity that pays attention to transportation timeliness, began to enter the city from the countryside.

Some milk merchants (often converted from dairy farmers who had completed primitive accumulation) hired cheap Italian or Guarani women (who often also worked as prostitutes) to act as milk girls and dress uniformly in the family quarters of large enterprises such as the Southern Depot and the Railway Machinery Factory, where the inhabitants were the main consumers of milk.

Agnelli struggled through the crowded farmer's market and arrived at his friend's house, only to be guarded by the Iron General. When I went to his shop, an Italian boy of twelve or thirteen years old was looking at the shop, and he told Sù Agnelli that his boss had gone out to buy goods and that it might take a week to return. Agnelli could only return disappointed when he heard this, he didn't have time to stay here, he had to rush back to Zhenhai County in the north as much as possible. (To be continued......)