Soon after, everyone started staying home under lockdown, listening to the news coming from Wuhan. The sky in Shanghai seemed to turn gray, life lost its color! Many people scrambled to buy expensive plane tickets to go abroad. Since I still had my own branded counters in China for retail business, and department stores belonged to the tertiary industry, the city government mandated they operate normally to maintain social prosperity. But in reality, the sales staff at the counters didn't want to work. The responsible department heads and managers kept calling me for my opinion. I don't know where the confidence came from, but I told them, "What's there to be afraid of? We went through SARS. It'll last three months, maybe six at most. If the sales staff refuse to work, to avoid fines from the department stores, let the store managers work. If there aren't enough managers, let the management step in. If management isn't enough, we'll do it ourselves!" Secretly, my calculated plan was: our main strength was overseas. As long as overseas was fine, we could definitely tough it out. Little did I know, three months turned into another three months, and the pandemic suddenly erupted globally, and even the Land of the Cherry Blossoms wasn't spared!
To be continued