Leave the list alone

The best piece of retail writing in Cairo this fortnight was typed by a school secretary.

It is a list. Two pencils, a squared notebook of a particular size, a file in one colour for each subject and a cover in another. It is badly set, in a font nobody chose. It carries no adjectives and makes no promises.

A mother is standing in the stationery aisle holding that paper in one hand. She is not shopping. She is matching.

The shops that do well in these two weeks are the ones that reprint the list, by grade, and hang it above the shelf. Nothing added. The items stay in the school's order, which is nobody's idea of a sensible way to merchandise a shelf.

Every instinct I was trained with says improve it. Group the items by type. Lift the higher-margin lines to eye level. Put a warm sentence at the top about the year ahead. Each of those edits costs the only thing the list is for, which is the match. A mother who cannot line the paper in her hand against the card on the shelf goes back to reading the paper, and buys the eleven things on it and nothing else.

I have written copy that was better than what it replaced and worse at the job. Persuasion is what you write when nobody has told the customer what to buy. Here somebody has, in writing, with authority, and the entire contribution left to make is fidelity.

So the hard decision this season is not what to say. It is seeing that the sentence has already been written, by somebody who has never sold anything, and keeping my hands off it.