Chapter 153: One Chicken a Week (1)
All businesses must strive for sustainability.
Monopolies, too, require long-term strategies to ensure they remain profitable for generations. Naturally, having secured a monopoly on military food supplies, I must ensure that it remains intact, ideally until the empire itself collapses.
“Chris, what do you think I should do next?” I asked.
Chris, who was organizing documents beside me, put down her pen and responded, “You’ve secured profits comparable to gold and silver mines, and you’ve been pushing yourself non-stop since the battlefield. Don’t you think it’s time to rest?”
The odds of a major crisis happening if I took a break now were close to zero. The military supply contracts, if maintained at their current level, would guarantee that all food-related operations for the next ten years remain under the Rothschild family. The resulting enormous profits, after minimal taxes, would be safely stored in our family vault.
However, money—or more specifically, opportunities to make money—always comes with timing.
If you miss the timing, the chance to make a fortune could disappear forever.
“Everything has its season,” I mused. It’s like preparing for college entrance exams in high school and job hunting after graduation.
“As long as I don’t blatantly provide spoiled ingredients or exploit the soldiers’ inability to complain about military supplies by delivering subpar food, the monopoly should be safe for at least ten years,” I said.
Chris nodded. “From what I see, maintaining the current state could easily last twenty years.”
“Becoming a baron makes it harder for merchants to challenge us directly, but they won’t sit idle. Within a year, they’ll analyze our methods and spread bribes to convince officials that it’s unfair for the Rothschild family to monopolize the military supply chain.”
Modern people often assume that those in the medieval era were less intelligent than us, but this is a misconception. The truth is, medieval and modern people are of equal intelligence. While a serf with no basic education might lack a broad perspective compared to a modern middle school student, merchants and nobles with proper education in this era would rival or surpass the intelligence of most university students today.