Cave Refuge

Although exchange stores directly managed by the Imperial Court feature clearly marked prices for all goods, the prices they offer for goods sold to them are not high.

While the purchasing price of the same goods is also clearly marked, and the difference between selling and purchasing prices is not significant, it seems possible to buy cheaply here and resell for a profit elsewhere.

However, once goods are sold to the exchange store, buying them back cheaply becomes unlikely, as even though the shop posts clear prices, those cheap goods are often out of stock, and any items in limited quantity and at a good price have already been internally consumed by the shop's staff.

Even in the era before the Natural Disaster when resources were abundant, clerks dealing with scarce goods would still intercept them in advance and resell them to ticket scalpers for a profit.

Nonetheless, the twists and turns within the exchange store have little to do with Dong Tianyu; having just arrived here without the base's internal currency, he also finds it difficult to find suitable trading partners outside, thus he has no choice but to exchange some funds here.

The exchange store, in fact, is located near the revenue department precisely to 'serve' newcomers like Dong Tianyu.

After spending more time at the base, one naturally finds appropriate trading methods to obtain funds; hence, there will be little to no visits to this place in the future.

Of course, since the exchange store is operated directly by the Officials, purchasing all kinds of goods, some survivors occasionally bring rarely used, hard-to-sell goods here to sell them directly.

After downloading and logging into the exchange store's proprietary app using a communicator, each member of the Thompson Family starts checking the exchange prices of all goods.

In Father Dong and Mother Dong's Storage space, although stocked with many items, selling all the goods from their Storage Equipment would not be enough to buy any level of property.

Don't be misled by what the staff said during the resettlement that Magic Capital Base has more houses than people and properties are cheap, as in reality, ordinary fleeing families cannot afford the lowest tier properties; most need loans.

Unlike pre-Disaster times where even seized properties required loan repayment, those properties in Magic Capital Base, if one cannot repay the mortgage, would only result in the confiscation of already paid amounts and subsequent eviction, without the debtor continuing to repay the mortgage.

Although Dong Tianyu's Storage space does indeed have many goods, those easily tradable ordinary goods were mostly cleared out by Dong Tianyu when he sorted out his Storage space.

However, if Dong Tianyu were to trade with the top-tier ingredients from Cave, setting aside whether Dong Tianyu is willing to, the purchasing price would surely be based on that of ordinary goods.

Even if Dong Tianyu talks eloquently, staff of the exchange store wouldn't just take his word for it without proof; they would definitely need tasting experience if they were to believe him.

In these Imperial Court departments, the most important thing to abide by is the departmental regulations, and it is only by tasting personally that one can understand the specialty of the goods produced in Cave.

Thus, even if the verification process goes smoothly, the sampling procedure alone not only consumes a lot of time but also causes a needless waste of many ingredients, and yet, the final selling price is still heavily suppressed, making the sale of goods produced in Cave not very cost-effective.

After searching in the Storage space for a while, Dong Tianyu found suitable goods to sell, which were the bundles of clothing collected from the clothing market warehouse.

Because when those clothes were collected, they were still in sealed bundles, so the styles of clothes in each bundle are essentially the same, the only difference may be the size of the clothes.

To be honest, opening those big bundles filled with clothes is like opening blind boxes; before unsealing, no one knows what the clothes inside will look like.

Dong Tianyu was actually curious and opened a few bundles, and after seeing the specific styles of clothes inside, Dong Tianyu immediately showed a disappointed expression, not because the clothes inside were ugly,

but because the styles of clothes inside were decent, considering that bulk-purchased clothes are likely not luxury high-end dresses but mass-market fast fashion, so the clothes inside weren't ugly but rather pleasing to most people's eyes.

The reason Dong Tianyu showed a disappointed expression after seeing those clothes was because, although the clothes in each large bundle were of different sizes, the styles were all exactly the same, and each bundle contained at least hundreds of identical clothes.

Even though those clothes had nice styles, considering the clothing compressed and crammed together in the bundles and thinking about those thousands of bundles stocked in Dong Tianyu's storage space, even if he changed into a new set every day, it would likely take a century to cycle through them all.

When dealing with others in bulk trades before, he had also proposed using clothes as the trade medium, but like Dong Tianyu, although others knew that those clothes might fetch good prices individually, even though clothing is the foremost necessity among food, clothing, shelter, and transport, during the times of Natural Disaster, if the temperature doesn't change drastically, many people indeed don't have high demand for their clothing.