“One watch isn’t enough, is it?”

“We haven’t the customer information.”

“So he bought designer shoes and a wallet as well.”

“That was on the debit card too.”

“He looks quite young, doesn’t he?”

“Early twenties at the most? He can’t be a teenager, surely?”

“Hm……”

The VIP customer service management team, Hyundo Department Store, Apgujeong.

Staff from the designer watch shop had passed the purchasing customer’s information across.

An operation structured so that VIP performance connects directly to the store’s takings.

Sales from the top customers, the ones inside the upper ten per cent, have more effect than the ninety per cent of ordinary customers do.

Which is why a department store’s customer management team has no choice but to stake its life on serving VIPs.

Competition to attract them is particularly fierce among the stores sitting in the Gangnam districts.

Bring one new VIP in and it’s a windfall.

Sometimes it’s a one-off, but most of them affect takings over the long term, which is why they stake their lives on the service.

Nor are VIPs of that kind lying about in any quantity.

Upper-class customers of that particular sort are a limited number.

Every day they manage their VIPs and fight a war with their lives on it to draw them away from other stores.

The management team couldn’t hide their excitement at the appearance of a completely new VIP candidate with no customer information whatever attached to him.

They put their heads together and gathered ideas for getting him registered as a VIP.

“Where is he now?”

“He’s on the fourth floor, in the golf clothing shops.”

“Golf clothing?”

At his team member’s words a light of certainty crossed the management team leader’s face.

He isn’t a VIP candidate.

He’s a VIP!

The golf wear that has a foothold in a department store is a different class from the other brand shops.

He moved straight to the golf shops directly after buying an expensive watch.

The line he’d walked was enough on its own to confirm him as the son of an upper-class house.

“I’d better go myself.”

“You would, sir?”

“I’ll go.”

“No. Something about the feeling is odd. I’ll go.”

Park Taesu, a veteran of the trade, the store’s VIP management team leader and a personal shopper.

Something in the back of his mind had come to him strongly.

It was overlapping oddly with the VIP pickup, years ago, that had put him in this post.

The fierce signal his instinct was giving him!

A smooth movement.

Park Taesu rose from his seat and straightened his dark grey suit.

He set the angle of the name badge on his chest right again as well.

“I’ll come with you.”

The woman who is his second stood up from her seat.

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

Yu Areum, the management team’s ace, noticed for her looks and her lively character.

Her own sense of these things is good, and when she deals with a customer alongside the team leader she generally feels something.

The two of them moved to the fourth floor at a fast walk.

“Reckon he’s the real thing?”

“Who knows.”

“Let’s just watch, then.”

The dozen or so management team staff left in the office gathered their eyes on a CCTV feed divided into scores of panels.

When the personal shopper team leader moves himself like this, it’s usually only when the direct family of a top-hundred group visits the store.

Financial means matter, but social reputation is a VIP standard as well.

And here the team leader had moved with nothing about the customer confirmed at all.

“How long has it been since our team leader turned up a new VIP?”

“Eh? A year, I think? And in all that time he hasn’t gone himself——”

Only then did the team members work something out.

They cut the conversation off and studied the CCTV together.

Cameras installed all through the store let them observe the line any person they wanted was walking.

The VIP management team, linked in with the security team.

Into their field of view came the team leader and Yu Areum, moving with their appearance in order.

And.

“That’s the man, isn’t it?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“Wow. What are those proportions? He’s a complete model.”

“……He’s an entertainer.”

The silhouette of a man walking toward the fourth-floor golf shops, and he was what came into the team members’ eyes first.

He was walking haughtily, crushing the male customers passing around him as he went.

Set the clubs aside — I’ve no golf wear at all.

Tomorrow is the day.

The day Pro An Hyeonju said we should go and have my first time.

There had been a kind of urgency in her eyes with no way of putting it into words.

Which made it hard to refuse.

I accepted, obviously.

I’d like to experience a course for myself as well.

Golf, which has been regarded as a sport the upper class holds to itself.

For ordinary people too it’s a sport that has become essential to business.

The trouble is that the clubs came free, but I’ve never once put golf wear on.

The fourth floor has a dozen or so specialist golf clothing shops crowded onto it.

Not only clothing — small golf goods of every kind were laid out on display.

“Hmm.”

Everything on display is designer, and choosing readily isn’t easy.

It’s territory outside the life I’ve had until now.

“Sir.”

A courteous man’s voice came from behind me then.

It doesn’t seem to be aimed at me.

There isn’t a member of staff on this floor whose face I know.

“Sir.”

The man’s voice again.

I turned my head, curious.

“Do you mean me?”

A man and a woman were standing where I’d turned, looking at me.

By their clean faces, their clothes and their bearing, they seem to be store staff.

The man looks to be in his late thirties, the woman late twenties or early thirties.

Both of them are considerable to look at.

The two of them looked at me with smiles at their mouths.

“Yes. Sir.”

“What…… is it you want?”

I asked it calmly, facing two people I didn’t know.

“Here, my card.”

The man offered a business card first, his manner courteous.

—Park Taesu, Team Leader, VIP Customer Service Management Team.

VIP customer management team?

The first department store I’ve visited since the regression.

I haven’t registered as a member yet.

There’s no particular point of contact where I’d meet these people.

In the past it’s a card I’d have taken in a posture of gratitude, both hands folded under it.

But my position is different now.

Knowing what they were after, I opened my lips slowly.

“And so?”

The question came back without a tremor in it, and Park Taesu flinched in spite of himself.

The young man in front of him is absolutely not ordinary.

The customers he has dealt with across a long time in department stores run into the tens of thousands.

Park Taesu has met all their faces and holds a statistical record of customer character in his head.

Not an ordinary person.

A strong VIP prospect, and the first in a long while to put him on edge.

He looked very young, early twenties.

Young enough that you could carelessly mistake him for a high school student.

Not one blemish shows on the skin, as befits the son of a wealthy house.

The well-bred look running quietly through him proves that background out as fact.

He isn’t the son of one of Gangnam’s upstarts, the sort who appear and vanish inside a moment.

There’s an aura particular to the upper class that they can never give off.

There are reasons for calling upper-class sons of this kind lion cubs and tiger cubs.

It’s because of an aura like this, which nobody can imitate.

It’s different from the air in a judge’s house or a prosecutor’s.

The sons of a Supreme Court justice or a Prosecutor General couldn’t put out an air like this either.

It’s the force given off only by the people of a house that owns settled money, honour carried down a long time, and power on top of both.

By name, the chaebol families of Korea!

And among those, only the families inside the top fifty with a fair length of history behind them.

He takes no contemptuous attitude in dealing with a person.

Nor, for that, does he hold them in any awe or treat them as weighty.

That composure held in his eyes.

With an ordinary customer, taking his card and making a fuss over it is the common-sense reaction.

The reaction of a certain future VIP customer is: And so?

“You appear to be shopping, and we’ll be able to help.”

“We came to guide you.”

Park Taesu answered with a smile and no sign of being thrown.

Yu Areum lent a hand beside him.

To Park Taesu’s eye the customer plainly looked as though he needed help.

That doesn’t mean you may cut into his shopping blindly and get in the way.

Upper-class people shop in something like the way art is looked at.

Their sons, too, have shopping routines of their own.

People who act on their own clear intentions rather than on anybody else’s eyes!

“……”

The future VIP customer looked at the two of them briefly.

“Understood.”

An unexpectedly easy answer came back.

There’s nothing extraneous in the answer at all.

This is the trace of an education in a distinguished house.

“Thank you. We’ll serve you as well as we can.”

Park Taesu bowed his head briefly.

It was an expression of thanks, and inwardly of satisfaction.

“I’m Yu Areum, assistant manager. Sir, do you need any help with shopping for golf clothing?”

Yu Areum, the shopper team’s ace, who had been standing quietly beside Park Taesu, stepped forward.

Her clean looks and her clear, precise speech make her a member of staff customers trust readily.

She was quick about it and cut in at the right moment.

“Yes.”

“Would there be a brand you usually favour?”

“Today is my first visit. I’m going out for my first time tomorrow.”

“Are you? Congratulations.”

Yu Areum smiled with a bright smile filling her whole face.

The team leader is on edge. That means there’s something here!

Yu Areum’s dream had been to become a personal shopper herself.

Park Taesu, the team leader standing with her, will shortly be promoted to an executive post.

There is more than one member of staff with an eye on his seat.

It’s a post with a salary over a hundred million and three per cent sales commission falling on top of it.

Over a year the income runs past several hundred million.

A management team pay structure where attracting a single VVIP customer means no worrying about your wages.

Yu Areum studied the man in front of her carefully, who looked out of the ordinary somehow.

Set aside his being a target for VIP recruitment — his looks are at a level entirely off this planet.

A height that tells models to step aside, and skin without one blemish on it.

A build that looks lean and looks solid at the same time.

For any woman the looks and the air are overwhelming enough that she couldn’t help but look.

“May Assistant Manager Yu see to you?”

Park Taesu took a step back.

He judged that today, an introduction was about as far as was appropriate.

“Yes.”

A short answer came back.

“If there’s anything not to your comfort, contact me directly. Enjoy your shopping, then.”

Park Taesu made a brief silent bow and was turning away when.

“Ha Tae-ung??”

(End of Chapter 30)