Ordinary Millionaire is a Korean TV program that discovers and interviews ordinary people who have built up their wealth and are now making big money. One episode covered the story of Kim Sang Seob.
He is a “scrubber” at a spa. Body scrubbing is a popular Korean skincare tradition carried out in public bathhouses and at home. It involves rubbing a small green mitten with a sandpaper-like texture all over the body for extreme exfoliation of dead skin.
Kim Sang Seob has been scrubbing for 35 years. When he was 20 years old, he saw a hiring ad at a bathhouse and began training there. Now, as a senior scrubber, Kim Sang Seob is often fully booked with customers. This means the spa makes up to ₩3.00 million KRW (about $2,020 USD) a day.
Kim Sang Seob shared, after paying off his team of 8 scrubbers, that he is left with nearly ₩30.0 million KRW (about $20,200 USD) in profit per month.
He has been titled the “Master of Scrubbing” on the show Master of Living as well. Since then, more customers have come pouring in to have Kim Sang Seob scrub their bodies.
Kim Sang Seob explained though not a lot of people from the younger generation are interested in scrubbing for a living, a beginner scrubber can make ₩30.0 million KRW (about $20,200 USD) per year, which matches the salary rates of many big-name companies’ entry-level positions in Korea.
Kim Sang Seob looks forward to hiring younger scrubbers whom he can train and turn into successful members of the scrubbing community. Kim Sang Seob stated, “I don’t ever think I’m just scrubbing some body. I consider it art. The body in front of me is my artwork.”
Watch him work his rub-a-dub magic here: