No More Free Parcel Service!

For three years Lim Sook-boon took in parcels for everyone in her apartment complex and never charged a won for it. It was a small kindness that the whole building stopped noticing, the way people stop noticing anything that is always there. Jo Chwi-hwa asked her to haul an eighty-jin table up to the sixth floor for free. Sook-boon said no. Chwi-hwa reported her out of spite, and the complaint cost her a fine and a suspension of the service she had been running for nothing. So Sook-boon took the shelves down and stopped. The complex fell apart within days. Deliveries piled up with nowhere to go, packages went missing, and losses mounted for people who had never once thanked her. Chwi-hwa got the worst of it: the betrothal gifts for her family's wedding were destroyed, the engagement collapsed, and she and her son were left facing the bill. Sook-boon opened a licensed parcel station on her own terms and put Chwi-hwa on a list of customers she will not serve. Whether Chwi-hwa accepts that or keeps working the neighborhood against her is another matter.