{"id":54717,"date":"2023-04-21T11:00:18","date_gmt":"2023-04-21T02:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dailynk.com\/english\/?p=54717"},"modified":"2023-04-21T10:02:46","modified_gmt":"2023-04-21T01:02:46","slug":"taesong-department-store-hands-down-gifts-employees-kim-il-sung-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dailynk.com\/english\/taesong-department-store-hands-down-gifts-employees-kim-il-sung-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"Taesong Department Store hands down gifts to employees for Kim Il Sung&#8217;s birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Kyonghung Guidance Bureau, a major North Korean trading company, and Pyongyang&#8217;s Taesong Department Store marked Kim Il Sung&#8217;s birthday on Apr. 15 with an extravagant distribution of gifts to some of its employees, Daily NK has learned.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cPyongyang residents and people in the suburbs have all heard rumors that the Kyonghung Guidance Bureau and Taesong Department Store held one of their biggest holiday provisions ever to mark the holiday,&#8221; a reporting partner in Pyongyang told Daily NK on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">According to the reporting partner, the Kyonghung Guidance Bureau and Taesong Department Store carried out a holiday provision for two days, Apr. 12 and Apr. 13, providing managing staff with cash bonuses of KPW 40,000 and higher officials with gradually higher bonuses, with vice director-level officials receiving KPW 500,000. One USD equalled KPW 8,010 as of Apr. 16.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Officials were also presented with a 5-kilogram container of cooking oil, four 450-gram bags of seasoning, 3 kilograms of sugar, 2.5 kilograms of pork, 20 halibuts, four bottles of Korean-made alcohol, one bottle of foreign alcohol sold in dollars, one bag of five apples and pears, one 2-kilogram chicken, candies, snacks and two pairs of shoes from Yuwon Shoe Factory, though actual weights and numbers changed slightly according to the rank of the recipient.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cKyonghung Guidance Bureau and Taesong Department Store teach their employees that they must bring about a decisive improvement in the lives of the people by selling better light industrial items at rational prices, and make the holiday more prosperous,\u201d the reporting partner said. \u201cBecause officials produced successful results in the first quarter, they were rewarded as promised.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Essentially, the Kyonghung Guidance Bureau and Taesong Department Store promised employees that they would provide bonuses of cash and goods if they overachieved on their first quarter foreign currency quotas by raising sales between January and Kim Il Sung&#8217;s birthday.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Spurred on by the promise, officials at the two organizations ran around like their lives depended on it to raise sales, despite difficulties and omnipresent shortages. In the end, first quarter sales were 1.5 times higher compared to last year, and the officials were richly rewarded, the reporting partner said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cPeople in Pyongyang and nearby Pyongsong are all jealous, having heard of the Kyonghung Guidance Bureau and Taesong Department Store\u2019s lavish holiday provisions,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, they also criticized how only officials in positions of responsibility received provisions, with ordinary workers excluded.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In fact, only cadres above the rank of manager received the holiday provision, while ordinary service workers and salespersons, who all had to work on the Apr. 15 holiday, were left with a bad taste in their mouths, the reporting partner said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><i>Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p><em>Daily NK works with a network of reporting partners who live inside North Korea and China. Their identities remain anonymous due to security concerns. More information about Daily NK\u2019s reporting partner network and information gathering activities can be found on our FAQ page\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailynk.com\/english\/faq\/\">here<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><i>Please direct any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailynk.com\/20230419-2\/\"><i>Read in Korean<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Kyonghung Guidance Bureau, a major North Korean trading company, and Pyongyang&#8217;s Taesong Department Store marked Kim Il Sung&#8217;s birthday on Apr. 15 with an extravagant distribution of gifts to some of its employees, Daily NK has learned.\u00a0 \u201cPyongyang residents and people in the suburbs have all heard rumors that the Kyonghung Guidance Bureau and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":53597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wikipediapreview_detectlinks":true,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,645],"tags":[274,930,1656],"class_list":["post-54717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","category-economy","tag-pyongyang","tag-foreign-currency","tag-dprk"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.7 (Yoast SEO v28.1) - 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