—Team leader. VIP red code at the drink corner just now.

"And there's hardly any time left before I go home."

Oh Taecheol, team leader of the Latte Department Store's VIP management team.

His face twisted as he read the message.

He had just loosened the tie that had been throttling him.

He had been short of breath the whole day.

Until a moment ago he had been assisting a VIP with her shopping, and he is wrung out.

Four hours ago the wife of the chairman of a mid-sized group, somewhere around seventieth in the chaebol rankings, had appeared with her friends.

A group whose main strength among its affiliates is construction. They made a mountain of money on the property boom.

Over the several years the boom ran on, their place in that order shot straight up.

Naturally there is a great deal of force in their shoulders.

The chairman and his wife live in an F-type penthouse at the Signiel.

They were registered as Latte Department Store VIPs as a matter of course.

She came in and out of the store at all hours as though she were going to the shop outside her door, and made Oh Taecheol's life a misery.

It is the power-tripping that the half-formed chaebol houses go in for, which is to say the upstarts.

Most of them bring people along in order to show off their wealth and their rise.

They take coffee or tea or whatever else free of charge and order this and that brought to them from the shop floors.

They are enjoying personal shopper room shopping in front of the people they know.

With the competition over department store VIPs growing fiercer lately, the customers' demands are crossing the line as well.

To fill his figures Oh Taecheol has thrown in his body and his mind, the whole of them.

The women who run bleary eyes over Oh Taecheol, who is on the presentable side among the shoppers, and order him about.

For his wife and child he has set his teeth and borne it.

Today he…