How a street treats passers-by

Walk through the older shopping streets of Deira and within a few doors you can tell how each one treats people who are only passing.

On one stretch, every shop keeps a man outside. He steps into your path, names a price before you have looked, follows for three paces, then hands you on to the man at the next door. Music from four shops plays at once. You walk faster, and you do not come back.

Two streets over, the doors are open and nobody stands in them. You can look, stop, carry on. If you ask, someone helps. If you do not, nobody minds.

The goods are similar. The rents are similar. The shopkeepers are no richer or poorer. The difference is a habit, picked up from the shop next door and handed to the next one that opens.

The person walking past cannot give anything back. Most of them will never buy, and that is the point. How a place treats people who are of no use to it is not a technique for selling, and it should not be judged as one. It is simply how things are done there, or not done.

The same holds online. Some sellers fill every feed they touch with noise aimed at people who will never be customers. Others are careful about who sees them and how often. The difference is rarely money. It is what that circle of sellers has come to treat as normal.

Normal is learnt by watching. So every shop, and every seller, is teaching the street either a little more care or a little less.