Spice And Wolf Teaches Real Lessons About B2B Versus B2C

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Spice and Wolf (1) (Dengeki Comics)

I recently read Spice and Wolf and thought being a merchant looked like fun. (A shallow reaction, I know.) Spice and Wolf is set in a world modeled on medieval Europe and tells the story of a traveling merchant and a wolf spirit on their journey together. It’s a rather understated title, but it’s popular enough to have spawned manga and anime adaptations. For a merchant, information and knowledge are everything, but sometimes nerve and quick wit are required too. It’s fun to imagine, hard to actually do — that sort of thing — but just watching it unfold is exciting, and the depth of the author’s knowledge, glimpsed in fragments across various themes, is genuinely impressive. Stories about heretical faiths, demonic possession, surveying techniques, fraud, how tariffs work, the way churches and merchant guilds hold power rather than armies — all sorts of things that seem to have nothing to do with us moderns turn out to carry lessons. Well, in that sense too, it’s a truly interesting work. Now, to get to the point: the protagonist’s profession, “traveling merchant,” is a textbook example of B2B. If you run a shop and sell goods to end customers, that’s B2C, but the people a traveling merchant does business with are almost always some merchant guild or small-scale retailer. (At least within the scope the story covers.) Of course there are various reasons for this — “that’s just the rule,” or “selling to end customers requires taxes and registration fees” — but fundamentally I think it comes down to efficiency. A traveling merchant is in some sense also a shipper, and “buy something cheap where it has low value, sell it high somewhere else” is the basic style of the trade. In other words, you can’t turn enough profit without buying and selling in bulk, so selling to individual end customers one by one is inefficient. If you have time to spare for that, you should be moving on and increasing your transaction count to boost your earnings instead. The daily life of a traveling merchant is, for sure, a rich vein of material for depicting an “unconventional story.” One scene in particular stuck with me: “in business, reading the other party’s mind matters.” It’s the scene where the protagonists, for certain reasons, attempt to smuggle gold. The tariff on bringing gold bought cheaply in one town into the target town is exorbitant. Put another way, that means if they can just get it into the town, it will sell for “quite a high price.” The problem is whether they can slip through the checkpoint at the town’s border safely, and the plan they settle on is hiding the gold inside a sheep’s belly, with a church-certified shepherd girl leading the sheep through. The protagonist pulls in a merchant guild that’s buried in debt and can’t move, getting them to put up the funds to buy the gold. He himself takes a cut for coming up with the plan and introducing the girl. In the forest near the town, as it comes into view, the protagonists are attacked by a pack of wolves, and they send the girl and the sheep ahead with one of the guild’s men as her guard. Once the wolves are safely dealt with, people from a different merchant guild appear. They haven’t come to help. It’s a betrayal. “It’s insurance, in case the smuggling gets traced back to you. Don’t take it personally.” The guild’s men had planned to eliminate the protagonists right around the point the plan was about to succeed. And a little later, the shepherd girl too. The protagonist is tied up and left in the wolves’ forest. “Leave him here overnight and there’s no way he survives.” But the guild’s men are neither a gang of villains nor criminals — they’re ordinary merchants. Unable to bear it, one of them lets his true feelings slip as he leaves. “We couldn’t raise enough money to buy gold to clear all our debts.” “At this rate our guild goes under anyway.” “Your cut is too big.” Here, the protagonist doesn’t react with “You bastards, how dare you betray me!” Strangely enough, his face shows more of an “Ah, I see, so that’s how it was.” Indeed, if you calmly consider things from their standpoint: they’re buried in debt and need every last coin, and on top of that they’ve put up the entire fund to buy the gold. In that situation, it’s not hard to understand why the thought arises among them that paying a cut to a protagonist who contributed nothing but an idea and an introduction doesn’t sit right. It’s understandable. And they’re cornered rats besides. It’s entirely plausible that, to survive, dabbling in something “unbecoming of a merchant” would be on the table as an option. This kind of development (this psychological portrayal) naturally owes something to the protagonist’s character, but at the same time I felt there was a “merchant’s psychology,” an “unwritten code,” lying behind it. That is: “if you can’t read the hand the other side is about to play, that’s on you.” Being a merchant is a business where the calculating survive. If you think you can squeeze more out of someone, you charge them more; if someone can’t pay, you don’t deal with them from the start. Sometimes you deceive people, and of course sometimes you get deceived yourself. But if it happens within a rule both sides share — that of “seeking profit” — then the one who got deceived is at fault, and even if you take a loss, you should accept it as “tuition.” In fact the protagonists themselves lie about “special furs” to jack up the price, and conversely get stuck with goods that are sure to crash in value. That’s just everyday business, nothing to get indignant about each time. In other words, there exists “a certain professionalism” there, and the bar for it differs by place, era, and industry. It’s a bit different from the plain common sense we normally assume. And as long as you don’t cross that line, it’s all “priced in” already — if you missed it, that’s on you. Whatever industry you’re in, there are “special circumstances” and “industry common sense” you can’t know until you actually step inside. Even if, at first glance, these seem far removed from ordinary common sense, a professional should understand them properly and put them into practice. Anyone who balks at that, or grumbles endlessly, is, in the end, just an amateur. I’ve never heard of a professional soccer player suing an opponent for damages after getting injured in a contact play. If an F1 driver, in a post-race interview after losing, cited the opponent’s car being too good as the main reason, that would be a pretty pathetic look. You’re a pro, so you have to accept that and move forward. Accordingly, in the world of “B2B,” of “pro versus pro” business, special circumstances that look, at first glance, unlike ordinary common sense keep peeking through. “Why would they make that choice?” “Is this company’s cut fair?” “How much risk is worth how much return?” When resolving questions like these, you can’t leave “industry circumstances” out of the picture. In fact, in work mode, it’s fair to say those “industry circumstances” matter far more as a basis for judgment than ordinary common sense does. The protagonist, as a human being, would naturally have every right to be angry, but as “a merchant crossing a perilous, high-stakes mountain pass,” he couldn’t afford to be. Well, this feeling itself is a “special circumstance” rooted in the era and setting, so it’s only natural that we “ordinary people” can’t quite grasp it. I’d say the word that stands opposite “B2B” is “B2C.” As it happens, I’ve spent my career moving through industries close to B2C. That’s because, once upon a time, I believed that “B2C is the pure form of commerce. B2B is nothing but dirty money flowing back and forth.” Back when my understanding of how society works was still shallow, all those various circumstances and industry norms probably looked like some mysterious den best left untouched. Affiliated companies, tangled vested interests, legislation paired with business development in response to it, etc. — it’s certainly true that, by ordinary common sense, a lot of it looks dirty. On the other hand, in B2C, the “C” — the end customer — is extremely unreasonable, and rightly so. They get swept up in trends instantly, they get bored easily, they’re vulnerable to media strategy, and baseless rumors stroll around unchecked. And that was exactly why, back then, I argued that B2C was “proper business.” In B2C commerce, things like “connections” or “obligations” simply don’t exist. Nobody can move tens of thousands of units on connections alone, and users don’t decide what to buy because of some obligation. Customers are fickle, uncertain, and sometimes not very smart, but in the end, every single time, it’s always “individual will” that decides the purchase. In a sense, it’s a very fair and square kind of existence. Against that, B2B — as the very phrase “businesslike” suggests — ought to be fundamentally “rational,” “optimized,” and “no-nonsense.” That’s what I used to think, but I need to revise the wording a bit now. B2B should be “brimming with professionalism.” Looking back, this, I think, was the correct expression I should have arrived at all along, in its true sense. People are irrational, they make mistakes, they cause trouble. That’s just how it is, unavoidably. So it’s wrong to demand consistency there. There’s no need to get angry at outcomes that aren’t rational, and no need to jeer at unclear decisions. The one thing you should earnestly demand is simply this: “Are they acting as a professional?” That’s the only point that matters. To an idealistic young person, this might sound like a convenient excuse. To a perfectionist, it might sound like the whining of an imperfect weakling. But this is reality, and it’s important not to forget that this is how the world actually turns. Idealistic young people and perfectionists are one component of society, but not the whole of it. Human affairs aren’t built to be lined up and discussed on a single unified axis. They’re more complex, more irrational, riskier, and less efficient than that. Put that way it sounds like nothing but negatives, but if professionalism is present, there’s no great need for pessimism. If anything, that space is probably brimming with rich activity. Reaching for the word “circumstances” too easily can sound like a cop-out, but as long as companies — or markets — are formed out of aggregates of human beings, there will inevitably be things that individual effort alone can’t fix. Running around trying to change the rules is a wonderful thing to do. After all, the rules were set by some small group of people somewhere. But overturning an atmosphere, a convention, or its history isn’t easy. Trying to take it on alone is like a mantis raising its arms against a chariot. Rather than fighting it, you should ride the current. In fact, there ought to be a clear “answer” waiting on the other side. Once you properly grasp the circumstances, you start to see what points actually matter. Once you understand the other party’s circumstances, you start to see what problem you should solve for them. Take a bird’s-eye view of society’s overall circumstances, and you’ll probably start to see whether an idea’s window of opportunity is “now” or “a bit later.” It’s the bad habit of the young to brush all that aside and try to power through on momentum, ideology, and ideals alone — or so I find myself thinking, now that I’ve gotten older. Watch out for mistaking one thing for professionalism. Even so, being a traveling merchant must have been a high-risk job. There’s presumably some concept of risk distribution, but since you’re converting most of your assets into goods, moving them, and living off the profit from selling them, you’re always living right next to the risk of losing everything. It shows up in the story too — how “guilds” formed that way, and how the bigger ones became “merchant associations,” which is to say today’s “trading companies.” That makes a lot of sense to me.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2013/10/336/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.