Bigger than the household

Walk a Cairo supermarket in the first week of Ramadan and the shelf has been rebuilt around somebody else.

The everyday pack, the one that carries the brand for eleven months, has lost most of its facings. Standing where it was: the large bottle, the twelve-pack, the catering tin, the printed gift box with a handle. The category takes more space than in February and offers fewer decisions inside it.

It looks like a promotion. What changed is who is being fed.

For one month the unit of demand is not the household. It is the table. A woman buying for four on a Tuesday in February is buying for twelve on a Tuesday in Ramadan: her sister's family, the neighbour, whoever her son brings home, the tray that goes down to the man on the gate. Nothing about that shopper wants the small pack. She wants the size that will not run out in front of guests, and she will pay more per kilogram for the size that will not run out.

That is the job the pack is hired to do now. Not better value. Not new. Not last year's sleeve in seasonal colours. Adequate to a table with more people at it than her own family, watched by people whose opinion she will hear later.

The gift box does that job crudely and at a premium and still sells out, which tells you how strong the job is.

A brand that arrives with only its everyday size has not been rejected. It has been read as domestic, a fine thing to be in November and an invisible thing to be now. It waits until Eid, when the shelf turns back and it is welcomed home at February's price, having sat out the weeks the category earns in.