Juice Lady

I came to know Juice Lady after my second visit of the juice bar where she works. Friendly, outgoing, and customer-oriented, Juice Lady, who is now in her mid-twenties, is a rare bred of sales person one could find in Hangzhou.

She always tries to chat with her customers with the intention to learn more about their needs and more importantly, to build a long-term relationship with them. She understands well that it is only with a base of loyal customers that would bring recurrent businesses for a small store to strive in a competitive environment.

With four years of store management experience at a multinational fast food joint under her belt, Juice Lady is now pondering about her professional future. She once dreamt of building up a fresh orange juice business empire in Hangzhou one store at a time. But a planned urban redevelopment had forced her boss to close the juice bar business long before a break even is achieve, thus cutting short her dreams of investing her future in this business area.

Her only dream now is to move on and move up from where she left off before her current stint. She wants a challenge in her professional life. She wants to learn. She wants to grow. Ideally, she would like to become a store manager again and perhaps in an even higher position in the service industry. The only problem she now faces is her lack of formal qualifications.

The highest level of education Juice Lady has attained is a technical college education where she learned about the art and production of silk crafts. She has minimal knowledge of English and computers that many employers demand in present days. She is eager to attain these skills too for the sake of landing a job she enjoys. But she would not be able to afford the tuition fees until she finds a decent job; and a decent job won’t come to her until she upgrades her skill set and formal qualifications. It is like a vicious cycle.

Will she, and many others who are bright, trainable, ambitious and have good work ethics as well as several years of work experience, be able to break such vicious cycle? It all depends on the society.

But with an oversupply of highly qualified human resources in many urban centres, it would be difficult to imagine any big and resourceful companies will the spend the money to re-train such group of people, let alone accepting their relatively low qualifications.

So it seems, entrepreneurship may be their only way out, to stay alive and to realize their potential in a globalized economy.