The supply and marketing cooperative is a 13-story square building, standing tall like a crane at the boundary between the slums and the wealthy district.
Each floor covers an area of 2,500 square meters, filled with a dazzling array of goods.
As long as you have money, people can buy everything here except basic food and munitions.
Daily-use chemicals, advanced foods, household appliances, and from home and kitchen supplies to decorative building materials, everything is available.
The building doesn't have a reception, nor does it have sales staff or cash registers inside.
The entire supply and marketing cooperative is unattended.
Customers have three ways to make a purchase.
People with a formal Wrist watch can place orders online from home, which are then delivered by drone.
Alternatively, they can walk into the supply and marketing cooperative's ground floor lobby and browse the product list through a terminal resembling an ATM machine, view images and video introductions, place a centralized order, and have the supply robots inside the building quickly collect the goods and deliver them to their front.
Customers can also walk into the mall at their own pace, see the actual products and place orders on-site, and collect their packages as they leave from the conveyer belt inside the main door on the side.
Ren Zhong does not want to waste time, and neither does he enter the building to scrutinize each floor, but instead quickly scans the product list at the operation platform in the ground floor lobby, reading out desolation and loneliness, as well as the words "devouring" from the seemingly clean and tidy, technologically advanced building.
The three sales models and the plethora of goods at the Alson Supply and Marketing Cooperative have greatly enhanced the efficiency of trade and commerce in Starfire Town.
However, it is precisely due to the existence of this giant entity that the opportunities for the town's lower class to make a living through small-scale retail of mixed goods, package delivery, and other basic industries have been completely blocked.
The lower class can only engage in insignificant small businesses like mending clothes and renting old books, which big companies disdain, while also having to face the brutal competition within the same class.
There's not even a chance to open a fly restaurant; from the source of raw materials, everything is controlled by big enterprises, leaving no one capable of reducing their restaurant costs lower than a cafeteria's.
Even with unique flavors, they can't compete with those private automated gourmet meals affiliated with big enterprises like Tianlong High-tech.
Automated private gourmet meals utilize AI mechanical automation to cook, controlling the heat with precision, and ingredient ratios down to micrograms, forming an overwhelming advantage over ordinary people with culinary skills in terms of price, taste, and all other aspects.
Moreover, the massive Alson Supply and Marketing Cooperative requires only over a dozen management personnel to maintain its operation.
It's said that these dozen management personnel are all formal Citizens, residing in villas within the wealthy district enclosed by the White Wall.
Ren Zhong searches for a formal Wrist watch in the list, confirms the price is 100 points, clicks the purchase button, and places the temporary Wrist watch on his left hand against the sensing area of the operation platform.
Beep—
A bone conduction electronic female voice sounds, "Purchasing a First Level formal Wrist watch, costing 100 Contribution Points."
After 30 seconds, a square hole with a side length of three meters opens in the ceiling above the operation platform in front of Ren Zhong, and a small mechanical telescopic arm suspends a palm-sized tray down to his eye level.
Ren Zhong's new watch is packed in a paper box, a typical industrial package.
He felt a sense of realization that from now on, he would also be part of the watch-owning group.
Setting aside the internet functions of the formal Wrist watch, just wearing it while sleeping would earn an additional 0.9 Contribution Points per day, paying itself off entirely in 112 days.
Even a "business" that pays itself off in less than four months is something that Zheng Tian's crew, outstanding among the Archaists, also endured without doing, instead of spending their limited money on other more urgent matters.
The tight shackles imposed on the Archaists in this world, and how low their survival needs are pressed, and how difficult it is to save a hundred bucks, are glaringly evident.
Then, Ren Zhong takes out the formal Wrist watch, contacts it with the temporary Wrist watch on his left hand, and says: "Transfer funds."
The voice in his cochlea sounds again, "Fund transfer successful, current balance 101.72 Contribution Points."
Ren Zhong is taken aback.
Something's not right.
He got 200 points from Sun Miao, sold the Crystal Winged Dragonfly debris for 0.72, so the total wealth should be 200.72.
After spending 100, the remaining balance should be 100.72.
Why is there an extra 1 point?
Where did it come from?
Initially, when he got the temporary Wrist watch, thinking he was just a pauper anyway, he didn't check the balance and didn't notice this phenomenon.
Even after earning money later, he hadn't deliberately checked, as such simple arithmetic could be done mentally, he didn't even activate the voice prompt for balance reading.