Judging by its size alone, this so-called industrial park is so shabby that it's hard to even boast about it.
This land, only about ten acres, is smaller than the area occupied by small and medium-sized enterprises in their county.
But when the industrial park opened just now, reporters saw many villagers secretly wiping away tears.
An elderly woman wearing a floral headscarf clasped her hands together and murmured, "May God bless Xiaoman so that she may live a long and healthy life! She is our Langshan's little lucky star and god of wealth!"
Reporters covering agriculture, rural areas, and farmers were particularly shocked than others.
Langshan's poverty is "famous throughout the county." Years ago, when this reporter came to Langshan for an interview, there was no bus service to the area, and they had to borrow two motorcycles from the county to get into the mountains.
Several years have passed in the blink of an eye. The road to Langshan has been completed. When he entered the village just now, he found that quite a few houses in the village had a private car parked in front of them!
The reporters decided to stay and take a closer look at this "internet-famous village" that the county leaders had high hopes for.
Actually, the TV station reported on Jiang Xiaoman's award win last time. However, in recent years, the internet celebrity economy has been booming all over the country, and an internet celebrity like Jiang Xiaoman with tens of millions of followers is not particularly outstanding among them.
Most importantly, the county only learned about Jiang Xiaoman's award after she returned home, which meant the news had already passed its prime time. So even though she received a warm welcome from the county leaders, the local newspaper didn't even bother to publish a brief news item.
If they had known earlier that Jiang Xiaoman, this internet celebrity, had been quietly causing so much trouble in the mountains, they would have definitely come to dig up news leads long ago!
But it's not too late now.
After Jiang Xiaoman rested for a while, she started the afternoon live broadcast. The reporter from the media convergence center silently carried his equipment and followed her.
The opening ceremony in the morning was held in the small square in front of the industrial park. Jiang Yu didn't have time to take pictures of what the inside looked like, so Jiang Xiaoman will introduce it to her in the afternoon.
As soon as Jiang Xiaoman appeared, more than a dozen fireworks exploded in the live stream room. A bunch of fans who logged on at the exact moment, as if they had come specifically for a feast, flooded the comment section with the message "Congratulations to Brother Xiaoman on acquiring the industrial park."
"Shh~ Don't talk nonsense! This industrial park belongs to the country. Langshan is benefiting from the country's support. Otherwise, how could we have the ability to build such a large industrial park?"
Jiang Xiaoman, eager to survive, quickly explained to her fans, fearing they might say something "outrageous," and changed the subject to start the first round of prize draws in the afternoon session.
Besides the fans who came to support the opening of the industrial park, Jiang Xiaoman, Jiang Yu, and Lang Ying, several merchants who often cooperate with them, also joined in the fun. They sent a lot of products via express delivery and even joked with Jiang Xiaoman that it was to congratulate them on the opening of the industrial park. Knowing that they would be doing a live broadcast on the opening day, they sent a batch of products for them to use in the live broadcast raffle.
Although the idea was simply to get free promotion in Jiang Xiaoman's live stream, Jiang Xiaoman readily accepted since they were all so familiar with each other. Then, she arranged for a full six-hour live stream on the opening day, with a prize draw every twenty minutes – a frequency that made the villagers envious.
But there was nothing they could do; today was a joyous occasion for Langshan Village, and no matter how envious they were, they couldn't compete with the guests for the red envelopes.
Friday afternoon was the usual time for work and school, but when it was Jiang Xiaoman's turn to do a live broadcast, the number of viewers in the live broadcast room actually increased instead of decreasing, making the TV reporters envious.
You have to understand that in order to generate buzz for their events, they usually schedule live streams for weekends. They have no choice but to work overtime for free; it's all for traffic and performance evaluation!
Even though they dedicated weekends and holidays after weekend, their livestream popularity still couldn't compare to that of Jiang Xiaoman, a top influencer with millions of followers...
What's even more infuriating is that during the live-streaming sales, Jiang Xiaoman watched the inventory in the backend rapidly being emptied, yet she kept advising her fans to "consume rationally" and "buy only what they need!"
What the heck? Are you guys using scarcity marketing tactics in your live-streaming e-commerce now?
They simply didn't believe Jiang Xiaoman hadn't stocked up on enough inventory!
They acted as if they'd never done a live stream before. According to the usual practice in this industry, Jiang Xiaoman will definitely say something like, "To repay the fans' enthusiasm, I had a big argument with the manufacturer, and I secured a lot of discounted products for my family," and then trick the fans into trying their best to grab them.
These are all basic practices in the live-streaming e-commerce industry.
Just as the cameraman was muttering a couple of complaints to himself, he heard Jiang Xiaoman ruthlessly announce over the other end: "Family members! Link #2, 'Trial Langshan Specialty Wild Vegetable Gift Pack,' is sold out, really sold out. Those who didn't get to take pictures, come back next time!"
"It's really all gone. If you don't believe me, you can check the videos I filmed before. The purslane is all wild from the mountains. We only dried less than 20,000 catties, and this is all the stock we have. I haven't even had a purslane and meat bun this year."
After saying that, worried that fans would continue to nag about the wild vegetable gift package in the comments section, Jiang Xiaoman quickly changed the subject.
The afternoon live stream was carefully planned. They introduced each cooperative and local agricultural tourism enterprise that had relocated to the industrial park one by one, and put their products on the shelves wherever they went.
They just visited the newly established mountain product processing plant in Langshan Village.
Both the village committee and the town government share a common problem: their collective economic accounts are too meager. Forget about distributing dividends to villagers like those wealthy villages online; they might even have to beg for donations from wealthy villagers like Jiang Xiaoman at the end of the year.
Last year, Jiang Xiaoman sponsored the village with 30,000 yuan; otherwise, the village wouldn't have been able to offer anything decent for the New Year's greetings.
In addition, some villagers had previously lost a lot of money after being complained about for buying wild vegetables and selling them online. After discussing with Jiang Xiaoman, the village decided to set up a mountain product processing plant in the village.
In this way, villagers won't need to compare prices everywhere when they go up the mountain to collect wild produce; they can sell it directly to the processing plant.
Villagers willing to engage in e-commerce don't need to spend money to stock up on goods or bear the risks. They can simply cooperate with the village's mountain product processing factories to sell the village's products directly. Although they don't earn as much as if they collected the mountain products themselves, the advantages are convenience, stability, and no pressure to lose money.
Now, any villager with a few thousand followers starts getting products from the village-run mountain produce processing plant, Lang Ying's wild mushroom cooperative, and Shan Yan's beekeeping cooperative. They have to film videos every day anyway, so hanging their little yellow bikes on the bikes won't stop them from working in the mountains. They can earn some pocket money by selling a few orders a day.
The village officials have become smarter now. Although the mountain produce processing plant is officially run by the village, the village still managed to persuade Jiang Xiaoman and Shan Yan to invest some money in it.
There was no other way. If Xiaoman and the others didn't invest any money, how could the village dare to go it alone? If the business failed, even selling their whole family wouldn't be enough to pay off the bank loan.
But it's different when we bring in Xiaoman and the other "rich guys". Xiaoman and Shanyan have money! As long as they invest, the village won't need to borrow money from the credit union to set up this mountain product processing plant.
Jiang Xiaoman and Shan Yan discussed it and also felt that they should help develop the village's collective economy.
When the village collective has money, all the villagers benefit. For example, every year the village visits and comforts the elderly living alone and impoverished families, and organizes volunteers to help with cleaning, farming, and harvesting.
Jiang Xiaoman was also poor, and poorer than many families in the village.
He still remembers that when he was a child, many grandmothers and aunts in the village saw that he was poorly dressed, so they found clothes that their children no longer wore, washed them, and sent them to his home.
I also remember that during festivals, village officials would come to their home with baskets of rice, cooking oil, and pork to offer their condolences.
I remember the year he got into university. Even though he and his father had already saved enough for his first year's tuition, the villagers, who weren't well-off themselves, still chipped in, giving him several thousand yuan for living expenses, some fifty yuan, some a hundred...
He agreed to jointly set up a mountain product processing plant with the village not only to help the village expand its collective economy, but also because he had visited the neighboring Shangtang Village and knew that planting wild vegetables was a good way for mountain people to get rid of poverty and become rich.
Jiang Xiaoman did the math for the village. Although the villagers' tea gardens are now used for intercropping wild mushrooms, mushrooms are afraid of the sun. In fact, mushroom bags can only be placed under some cool and damp trees on a tea mountain.
The remaining sunny spots are actually more suitable for sowing some wild vegetables, such as purslane, which they just tried this year. All you need to do is loosen the soil a little, remove the weeds, sow the purslane seeds, and then you don't have to worry about it.
As long as you water it a few times during droughts, and don't let it die of drought, this thing is incredibly resilient. It doesn't even breed many insects, and the yield per acre is extremely high!
Dried purslane can be stewed with meat or used to make steamed buns. City dwellers love to eat it. This year, they tentatively planted some on the mountain and dried more than 10,000 kilograms of purslane, which sold out in one live broadcast.
Unlike cooperatives, wild vegetable cultivation relies on the idle and scattered plots of land belonging to individual households, making it difficult to quantify. Therefore, Jiang Xiaoman suggested that the processing plant simply open its doors to purchasing from the entire township.
As long as your family has land and can sow purslane, you can take it to their village-run mountain products factory's purchasing point to exchange it for money, no matter how much you plant or how much you dry it to meet their standards.
In this way, mountain product processing plants do not need to bear the initial risks of growers like cooperatives do, which means they can start with a lighter burden. Moreover, with their online sales channels as a safety net, they do not need to worry about excessive inventory pressure.
Most importantly, by connecting these links, everyone—from the village-run mountain product processing plant and these e-commerce livestreamers to the villagers of the whole township—can make money from this business.
Now that the processing plant has moved to the industrial park, there is another benefit: it can enjoy various supporting welfare policies of the industrial park, such as lower factory rent than the market price, preferential water and electricity fees, and tax reductions.
In this way, more profit will remain in the village collective account in the end.
Oh right, there's one more thing Jiang Xiaoman almost forgot. According to their new policy, for every mountain product sold through the industrial park's official livestreaming room, one cent will be donated to a scholarship fund for impoverished students.
Don't underestimate a single penny. Little by little, it adds up. If you save up enough over a year, it could probably help all the poor students in Langshan Village go down the mountain to study.
Jiang Xiaoman is really good at stirring up emotions, or perhaps he himself didn't realize that his straightforward way of speaking to the camera and slowly telling them about their expectations for the future of the village-run processing plant inexplicably made the viewers in the live broadcast room excited.
It's just buying some local produce, right? We buy it for our family anyway. Jiang Xiaoman's livestream is having a promotion today, so the prices are even cheaper than usual.
Buy, buy, buy!
Jiang Xiaoman spent half an hour at the village-run processing plant and cleared out all 30,000-plus items that the plant had painstakingly accumulated.
Who would have thought that even the handicrafts such as baskets, winnowing baskets, bamboo sieves, and bamboo wicker baskets that the village organized its elderly residents to weave by hand in order to meet quotas were all sold out.
"Wait! I understand you buying bamboo baskets and sieves; they're useful for things like grocery shopping and drying things. But what are you going to do with these hampers?"
Jiang Xiaoman is such a worrier! As soon as she sees that her fans have bought things they don't need, she immediately gets anxious for them and tells them to apply for a refund if they bought the wrong thing.
However, this fan completely ignored him and refused to refund!
A few days later, Jiang Xiaoman had completely forgotten about it until she learned of the new use for the bamboo baskets in her fan group.
This fan is a florist. She bought their baskets and planted several golden Buddha's Hand citrons in them. The customer who gave them as gifts was very satisfied, especially with the novel flower containers like the baskets. It is said that the recipient of the gifts was an old educated youth who fell in love with the baskets as soon as he saw them.
For some inexplicable reason, Jiang Xiaoman brought in a new business for the village-run mountain products factory.
Who would have thought that baskets used in rural areas to hold corn and potatoes could actually be used to grow flowers?!
Chapter 274
Next to the village-run processing plant is Lang Ying's wild mushroom processing plant. However, because the business expanded too quickly, after a meeting of several shareholders, it was decided to integrate the processing plant and the wild mushroom planting cooperative. Now it is called "Langshan Food Factory".
The newly registered food factory not only has a supporting wild mushroom cultivation base covering thousands of acres under the forest, but also developed several kinds of wild mushrooms unique to Langshan, producing products such as wild mushroom sauce, vacuum-packed wild mushrooms, and freeze-dried mushrooms. Furthermore, it has signed a cooperation agreement with a camping base to provide tourists with activities such as mushroom picking and wild mushroom sauce making experiences…
This ever-growing business line has made the village-run mountain product processing factory next door extremely envious.
Lang Ying herself has many fans online, and in the past two years she has also mentored two apprentices, so there's no worry about selling the factory's goods. However, to support the industrial park's opening livestream event, the food factory still contributed 20,000 pieces of its inventory to participate.
Jiang Xiaoman wasn't worried at all about Langying's products not selling well. Wild mushroom sauce was their flagship product among Langshan's local specialties!
On Lang Ying's side, he mainly wanted to show his fans the kindergarten classes that were part of the factory.
After moving into the industrial park, all the functional departments of the factory needed to be equipped, and the food factory also had a union activity area. However, since most of the factory's employees were women, they voted collectively and ultimately decided to convert the activity area into a childcare center.
Jiang Xiaoman also agreed. He even cited the neighboring Shangtang Village as an example, where factories also have their own childcare centers. Although setting up a childcare center takes up some space and requires the factory to incur extra expenses, once the little ones are settled, the female employees in the factory are much more motivated to work.
Most importantly, the children are taken care of. Although they should have left work at 5:30 pm sharp, many female employees choose to continue working overtime at the factory until 7 or 8 pm so that their children can finish their homework at the after-school care center... This is similar to the late-night overtime benefits offered by many large Internet companies.
Working overtime means you can get a free dinner at the company.
If I work overtime until 9 p.m., I can still get a late-night snack.
Some single people have no one to accompany them home, so they work overtime until 10 pm, and their companies even reimburse their taxi fare so they can go home without having to squeeze onto the subway...
The village is currently facing a severe labor shortage, and every able-bodied man is precious. The food factory only needs to allocate a few thousand yuan each month to maintain the daily needs of the after-school care program, which is enough to make the female employees with children willingly work overtime until seven or eight o'clock in the evening. Is there a more cost-effective deal than this?
Of course, in the eyes of netizens, the fact that a workplace can provide an after-school care program for its employees is a really good benefit, regardless of whether it is to encourage employees to work overtime!
Especially for many stay-at-home moms who want to go back to work, if their employers are willing to help them take care of their children, they would be willing to work overtime, even without overtime pay!
Men who haven't raised children may not understand how sometimes mothers would rather stay at work and work overtime than go home and deal with their children's eating, drinking, and toileting needs.
Those desperate cries of "Mommy, Mommy" were even more frightening than the boss's roar.
Lang Ying herself went through the same thing. At that time, she didn't even have a job, so she could understand better than anyone how difficult life was for stay-at-home moms in rural areas.
They understand better than anyone else the sentiment of rural mothers who would rather stay with their children than not find a job.
Moreover, their food factory's childcare center is not only for mothers to temporarily leave their children after school, but also for male employees to bring their children to enjoy this benefit, treating everyone equally!
In the live stream, because the food factory has set up a childcare center for its employees, a large group of mothers are eager to tag their bosses to see it.
Look at them!
Even a village-run food factory has this kind of thinking and courage!
Let's take a look at our company!