Call the failure today

A small cereal brand in Cairo has a flavour that is not selling. Everyone close to it knows. The packs sit at the back of the shelf, the shopkeepers have stopped reordering, and the last cartons in the storeroom are drifting toward their dates.

The owner's instinct is to leave it alone. Keep it listed. Look again after the holidays. Perhaps the right shopper has not found it yet.

That is not patience. It is postponement, and the two are easy to confuse.

Keeping a failed product half alive does not make it less of a failure. It makes the failure larger and later. It ties up stock, takes space from the flavours that do move, muddles what the brand stands for, and asks the people selling it to explain something nobody believes in. One bad decision quietly makes every decision around it harder.

We do this everywhere, not only on shelves. The project we have stopped caring about, the subscription we keep meaning to cancel, the plan we keep pushing to next month. Calling it a failure feels expensive, so we hand the bill to some future version of ourselves who will somehow have more time.

They will not. If there was no time to do it properly the first time, there will be even less time to undo it and start again.

There is a quieter benefit to saying it out loud early. Once you are honest about the thing that is going to fail, you start to see which of today's efforts are heading the same way, and you are far more likely to fix them while fixing is still cheap.

Call it now. Today is already spent on it. There is no reason to spend tomorrow as well.