A habit is not a kind of person

Small sellers in Kuwait, and everywhere else, have a sentence they say about their customers. People here only buy on discount. Or: young people do not read. Or: nobody pays before they have seen it in person.

It sounds like knowledge. Mostly it is a shortcut.

Everyone is like everyone else, and everyone is unlike everyone else. Sorting people into kinds, the bargain hunters, the loyal ones, the ones who never read past a headline, feels useful because it is tidy. But it treats a habit as if it were a nature.

What is actually true is narrower. This person, today, in this situation, with these options in front of her, tends to choose in a certain way. People who share that situation tend to choose alike. When enough of them do, it looks like a market, or a trend, or a national character.

Take the shopper who only buys on discount. Look at what she has been offered for years: prices that drift up for no clear reason and fall every few weeks in a sale, so that paying full price feels like being caught out. She has learned. She is answering the deal in front of her sensibly. Keep prices steady and honest for long enough, and the same woman starts to behave differently.

She was never a type of shopper. She was a person answering the same question asked the same way, again and again.

This matters because a kind of person is fixed, and a habit is not. Believe the first and there is nothing to do but complain about the customers. Believe the second and every pattern becomes something that can move, given a different offer and some time.

People settle into patterns. They are not born into them.