Chapter 198. The Three Factions at Work. (2/2)

I checked the results today to see who won. The cut-off was 9:00 PM when our shift ended, the faction that won today between the two stores was the Alicia faction. Their faction was quite powerful with the most new members. They would typically win four days out of the week. 

Yuna’s faction would win two days out of the week. As her faction consisted of more wise veterans customers they didn’t see the need to win every day. So long as they picked up their two wins for the week, they were content.

Rosa’s low-key faction would only win once every week. But they should not by any means be underestimated by those results. It was because they conserved their resources and aimed for a guaranteed victory on the day of their choice. Her faction wasn’t the type to splurge mindlessly like the disorderly mob in Alicia’s faction. That was why I was convinced they operated more like a secret government and decided which days they would win. Though Rosa’s faction had the fewest members, they were amongst the ranks of intelligent elites with much deeper pockets.

In summary:

Alicia’s faction accepted all new and old, be they poor or rich, and they resembled a cult.

Yuna’s faction consisted of the experienced and loyal who’d been well cultivated and marinated over a long period of time. Their roots had grown deep.

Rosa’s faction welcomed the rich elite with deep pockets who had more refined tastes.

Ran’s faction, it just didn’t exist. I mean… it’s not like I want one or anything. I’m not sulking, I swear. I know I’m not a pretty girl and I’m just a pitiful gloomy guy. Even if I know that… even though I know… it’s still frustrating.

The randomly selected winning receipt number was already displayed on the website. The customer could come in to claim their prize at any time so long as they presented the receipt with the winning receipt number on it. That was the case if they weren’t a customer registered to the store's unique form of a loyalty rewards program.

If they were registered to the store’s loyalty program and they swiped their loyalty card at the time of purchase, their receipt would already be tied to their profile, so they wouldn’t need to worry about saving their receipt that way. 

They also didn’t need to come into the store to claim their prize in person. They could have the ‘undisclosed’ prize mailed to them, or if they wanted to be environmentally friendly, it could even be… emailed to them. This small little clause I noticed was another factor that convinced me the rewards had to be pictures of their favorite girl at the store.

The store had a different sort of loyalty point system in place as well. You couldn’t actually use them to purchase any products in the store, so on the surface, they didn’t have any monetary value. How many points you had was sort of like a symbol of status and power among the factions.

Any time a faction won, a designated number of points for a specific day would be distributed among the factions. Each day that designated number of points would be randomly generated and posted as a prize pool on the website. The way the points would be distributed was based on your contribution of how many of that item you purchased.

So if the prize pool was 1000 points for that day. If you bought 5 packs of the gum with the most sales that day, and there were a total of 100 sales for that gum, you’d get 5% of the points from that day’s prize pool. This was another reason why the three gummers were scorned by the three factions. They were in it for the points rather than to rep the girl of their fancy, that was the general consensus among the factions.

There were leaderboards set up as well, you could either enter your name or an alias of some sort.

Though you could use the points to purchase things in the store, it was possible to exchange them with other customers. From what I understood a copy of the prize the customer received could be accessed from their account. They could transfer that prize to another customer’s account. So if they were pictures like I thought, it was possible the Owner had implemented a collectible game of some kind.

There could very well be rarities to the pictures the winning customer received ranging from common up to legendary. If they collected doubles they could send them over to another customer in exchange for points.

Though they would no longer have access to the copy of the prize on their account, they could still save the image itself if they didn’t specifically care about the account itself having all the pictures of each rarity.

The Owner had no doubt created a terrifying system to get people addicted. I was so horrified because it was the embodiment of all that was evil. It was far worse than a simple gacha game, sinister and devious to its core. It could hardly be considered gambling because customers could trade them points or no points through their accounts. They also didn’t particularly do anything even if you had them on your account. They were only symbols of status.

Right now, even common pictures were highly sought after because of how difficult they were to get. Only one was given out a day after all. For customers who wanted to collect them all, they were willing to buy points off each other in person in the store with cash.

The store would not sell points to anyone. They could only be won fairly or traded for with other customers.

How they conducted those trades behind the scenes had nothing to do with the store.

I’m sure it violated some sort of law, but I turned a blind eye to it. It felt like a shady gray area so I wasn’t sure.

Anyway, the point was the store was making a killing with the way things played out.

The Owner was fearsome. With such a unique loyalty reward system in place, I wouldn’t find it strange if she planned to expand the business even further and open another store in the future. She’d definitely hunt down some more beauties if that was the case. Perhaps there would one day be a new powerful faction to rise in the future.

Maybe a faction would one day face destruction as well. When I imagined the rise and fall of factions, I couldn’t help but curse. This system was better than the systems I came up with for some of my own stories. What the hell? How does the owner of a convenience store come up with something like this? Isn’t it unreasonable? You’ve got starving authors like me working our asses off, then you’ve got a convenience store owner ripping off a system they probably didn’t even come up with on their own.

It’s not like someone could sue her for plagiarism. It’s a different medium. Who knows where she got this idea anyway. If it was an original idea of hers, hats off to her. She could just be a natural innovator in her field. Pushing for a revolution in the world of convenience stores in our constantly evolving world filled with an ever-increasing number of degenerates. She was a visionary, a horrible one at that; if she had her way, pitiful sobs like me would never be able to find a job again in the not-so-distant future.

It was a good thing large stores existed, their standards were at least lower than the Owner’s. Jobs on the back end or late into the night were perfect for denizens of the night like me. Honestly, I’d even consider switching out for a job at night as you had to interact far less with customers, the only problem was the fact they often wanted full-timers. They’d also work you to death with hard labor. You’d have a quota to fill and you’d get talked down to if you didn’t meet it. It was a trade-off.

You’d think you’d have more time to yourself, but they always found work for you to do even at night. I’d experienced it for about three months when I was fresh out of high school during summer. I was saving up some extra money for university my first time through life. By the end of my shift, my back would be aching and my toes would be on the verge of bleeding. That was all because the steel-toed boots I’d purchased at a heavily discounted price from the store were a size too small for me.

It was an awful experience overall. The managers were all dicks. They didn’t give a shit how tired you were, they’d make you work yourself to death when you were sweating on the verge of collapse from the summer heat. The store was air-conditioned, sure, but the area where you had to unload boxes of merchandise from the trucks at the back of the store wasn’t since it was open to the outside.

I’d never make the mistake of working for a big box store again unless I was left with no other choice. It would be an absolute last resort situation to work for them. For me, a small convenience store like this was nice even if the customers could be a pain in the ass at times. But regardless of the store, every store had customers that were a pain in the ass. It was just a matter of which store had less of them.