Across the causeway

The busiest week of the year for a restaurant in Bahrain is a holiday on another country's calendar.

Eid al-Adha is expected around the twenty-seventh of this month, depending on the sighting. Whatever morning it lands on, the queue at the causeway will be the longest thing in the country. The Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia is half an hour of road plus however long the border takes, and a family that wants a change of scene does not need a flight for it.

So the hotel fills with people who live somewhere else. The table for four becomes a table for nine with two high chairs. The car park reads like another country. And the family lunch a Bahraini marketing team wrote for Bahrain is eaten by visitors.

Now read the plan that team wrote. Bahrain's own holidays are on it. A resident is in the persona. The media was bought inside a country you can cross in an hour, in the week of. The rota was built around the local holiday, and the two countries do not always announce the same day, so the morning the kitchen is thinnest can be the morning the cars arrive.

The stock order is the same mistake with a delivery note attached, placed on last month's covers and last month's average table by somebody who has not asked how many of next week's tables will seat nine.

The honest version of that plan is not more sophisticated. It has a Saudi family on the brief. It buys attention on the other side of the water a fortnight out rather than in Manama on the day. It builds the rota to the neighbour's holiday.

A small market's peak is not decided in the small market. It is decided by the calendar next door, and the plan either has that calendar on the wall or it does not.