Decided by the second Friday

By the second Friday of Ramadan the trolley is the same trolley as the first Friday's.

The same bread, the same yoghurt, the same box of dates, the same juice in the same size, two bags of whatever the household turned out to need every single night. The month began around the eighteenth, depending on the sighting, so this is roughly the tenth day of it, and the table is settled.

The first week is the only part of the month that is genuinely a choice, and very little in any plan treats it that way. In the first three or four nights a household will buy something it has never bought before, because it is laying a table it has not laid for eleven months and something is always missing. A brand can be tried in that window. A dessert place gets one chance to become the dessert place. One delivery order gets one chance to become the order.

After that nobody is choosing. Everybody is repeating. The same shop on the same evening, the same three or four places, the same order, because a family eating at a fixed minute does not experiment on the way to it.

The volume keeps rising, which is what makes this hard to see. Week two and week three read as a campaign working, and what the campaign is reaching is a household whose decisions closed on a Friday nobody was watching.

What rises from here belongs to a different shopper anyway, buying clothes for children who have grown since last year, for a holiday at the end of the month.

The grocery brand ramping its media into the third week is not late for Ramadan. It is exactly on time for a month that stopped taking new information ten days ago.