There was a limit to how far the ant-leg-sized contributions of individual employees could go toward Taecheon's targets. The most efficient approach was to land a big company with lots of staff. Befriend its president, vice president, accounting department, or bookkeepers, and somehow get it using Goldlight accounts. Payroll accounts were best. Add deposits, savings plans, or credit cards when issuing salary-account cards, and all the better. Whenever those employees visited, you could sell them a fund, insurance, or a wealth-building savings plan alongside whatever they needed.
Ma's chosen method was to shower clients with expensive gifts, expensive meals, and expensive alcohol. Winning someone's favor hadn't changed much in a thousand years. But a big corporation wasn't a prize fish easily hooked by gifts, food, and drink. Its accounting staff knew perfectly well how eagerly bankers courted them. Accounting heads and bookkeeping managers freely enjoyed gifts, drinking parties, and meals from multiple banks. They balanced between them, making empty promises about switching employee payroll accounts and asking whether the next bank would treat them better. Bankers who fell for it joined the balancing act.
“Duna Bank, which we use now, treats us terribly. I wasn't asking much. Just a little more attention and care. They've really disappointed me.”
“You won't have that problem with Goldlight, Department Head. You know how well we look after people.”
“Really? You do treat me well, Manager Hwang. Goldlight's good. Should I move all our employees over?”
“You won't regret it. We'll make you forget Duna Bank.”
“Really? But I think the higher-ups might find it a nuisance.”
“Isn't it our job to make sure they don't?”
“You catch on quickly, Manager Hwang.”
That accounting head had probably said the same thing to High Interest Bank, Family Bank, and Love Bank. He'd probably squeezed gifts for his superiors out of them too. Just like the gifts Hwang was handing over now. I even wondered whether those gifts reached the higher-ups. He might have diverted them himself. At Duna, his current main bank, he'd probably demanded things by saying they had to treat him well if they didn't want him to switch. Hwang gestured, and I hurried to fill the accounting head's glass. All I wanted was for the bastard to get thoroughly drunk so this would end.
Ma shouted that every employee had to attend every dinner, whether for clients or month-end staff gatherings. We had to show clients Goldlight's unity. He was always barking nonsense. What did full attendance at dinner have to do with branch unity? The client probably wouldn't care if one or two bankers were missing. But at a branch, the manager was king.
Of Monday through Friday, four nights had dinners. Friday was usually spared because client companies avoided that day. It wasn't consideration for staff in company housing who returned like salmon to homes two or three hours away. Sometimes there was a Friday dinner too. Then employees had to go home Saturday morning or stay at the residence all weekend. But company housing wasn't somewhere to live for long. Like a service station or petrol station, it was only a temporary stopping place. People struggled to get away, if only briefly, to somewhere they could feel at peace.
The first-round restaurants banked with Goldlight. We went to boost their takings, and they welcomed that. We booked the usual beef, eel, pufferfish, and baby octopus places in a hamster-wheel rotation: beef Monday, eel Tuesday, pufferfish Wednesday, octopus Thursday. Sometimes ginseng chicken soup or a seafood restaurant replaced eel or octopus. Even the regular beef and pufferfish places changed at Kim's request.
Sometimes we booked restaurants that didn't bank with us and promised frequent staff dinners if they'd open Goldlight accounts or move their employees' payroll accounts over. But there was another purpose. Kim's idiotic philosophy was that repeatedly spending large amounts at one restaurant made the owner slack. To keep them trained, we mustn't go anywhere too often. Occasional visits kept them grateful and generous with extras. Keep buying lots of food, and our customer, the restaurant owner, would take us for granted and grow arrogant. Between serving customers, I called restaurants as Kim or Lee instructed. The owner answered at [Endless Prosperity Pufferfish].
“Hello. Officer Eun Su-won at Goldlight Bank. It's been a while.”
“Goodness, I'm forgetting your faces! Come and eat more often.”
“We'd always love to have our dinners at your place. Could we book this Thursday?”
“Any day's good. Just come. Shall I put you down for eighty?”
“I'd like fifteen people at seven in the evening. Could we have our usual room at the back? Please set out four large platters of boiled pufferfish.”
“Four platters. Got it! If you don't come, I'll come looking for you.”
“Understood. See you Thursday. Have a good day.”
I disagreed with Kim. Wouldn't frequent, generous custom make us regulars and earn better service? He thought service stayed much the same however much we spent, and owners became annoying, asking why we hadn't visited lately unless we went every day. Voicing my opinion would only earn a warning not to act up when I knew nothing. I booked what I was told.
The restaurants also needed a separate space where Goldlight and client staff could be shut away from other diners. Sole proprietors, corporate representatives, presidents, vice presidents, accounting team leaders, and bookkeeping staff, whether already customers or not, would go with us or arrive after we were waiting at the restaurant.
Occasionally, a company ate the expensive meal the bank provided and finished without a whiff of alcohol. I loved those owners and employees from the depths of my heart. People with their heads on straight. They were very rare. Most liked drinking. They wanted expensive food and extreme intoxication at Goldlight's expense. And they wanted to make spectacles of themselves, as though they'd waited ages for precisely this treatment.
At Hwapyeong, only the two or three people directly involved in corporate lending went to these dinners. Usually, the relevant manager, senior manager, or deputy met two or three client staff, making a modest group of four to six. Whole-branch client dinners like this were very rare. Apparently, such bastardly gatherings had been common in banking in the early 2000s, but so many incidents had followed that they were hardly done anymore. Ma wanted something beyond old-fashioned: an obsolete relic. In his view, the modern approach of pasta and coffee brought no sales at all.
Ma, forever squawking Sales, sales like some sales bird, had lofty dreams. He wanted to escape the insignificant Taecheon branch, buried in a rural corner, and become head of Goldlight's Daeseo Industrial Complex Center, a post practically equivalent to being selected as the next regional head. After that, his goal was to rule the entire Pyeongan region. He considered advancement to his destined position only natural. His employees were slaves, servants, attendants, and sacrifices who should offer him body and soul. Yet sometimes, like malfunctioning robots, they made strange noises about leave, going home, or violations of workers' rights. He saw that as jealous obstruction, grabbing his ankles when he should be soaring.
Absurdly, the clients secretly liked these old-fashioned dinners. A clean gathering with zero-sugar cola and soda, ending with everyone holding an expensive coffee and not smelling of alcohol, seemed stiff and cold to them. They preferred Ma's method: drinking vast amounts, spewing nonsense, behaving disgracefully, saying every offensive thing that came to mind, and pretending it made them close. I didn't understand it. Did they hate living in the world with their wits intact?
Men especially liked his approach. They enjoyed young female bankers calling them President~. President~. in nasal voices, pouring drinks, and asking them to use Goldlight often. They desperately ignored the way those women's faces went blank the instant they turned away. They tried hard to believe, wrongly, that these women loved them deeply.
These owners earned middling sums as sole proprietors or corporations, running businesses that hardly qualified as small companies even generously described. They paid minimum wages, made staff work six or seven days a week without proper weekend pay, kept them at it twelve hours a day, occasionally slapped them, and treated sexual harassment as standard practice. They delighted in bankers bowing and scraping and treating them like kings. Quite a few were proud of succeeding without finishing high school or university. They enjoyed the triumph of seeing bankers who'd drunk deeply of university education crawl beneath them and cater to their whims. They especially wanted university-educated female bankers pouring their drinks and waiting on them. I couldn't understand it. Did alcohol taste different when a university-educated male banker poured it?