Nobody needed a driver

Riders sitting in the car park with nothing to do, and a queue at the counter running out onto the pavement.

That is a Mother's Day that lands in the days just after Eid, which is where this one fell, depending on where the sighting came in.

The gift did not need a driver. The family was already in the room. Everyone travelled on Thursday, the aunts arrived for Eid and stayed, and the flowers and the cake were carried in by hand or handed across a sofa to a woman sitting three feet away.

So the shops that read the date as a delivery day, and put on extra bikes and a dispatch shift for it, got a collection day instead. Ten in the morning until two, one till, four people deep, a shop with floor space for a dozen customers holding a few hundred collections, and a rider fleet on the clock.

Delivery capacity and counter capacity are not the same business. One needs riders, a dispatch screen and a sensible route. The other needs a second till, somebody working the door, boxes made up in advance and stacked by collection hour, and a way to hand an order over in forty seconds without looking anything up.

The job that day was handover, not transport, and handover is a shop-floor problem that gets solved with staff and shelving rather than vehicles.

An occasion has a location, and the location moves. In the days after Eid the country is sitting in its family's living room, so a gift day inside that week is a walk to the shop and a walk back.

The calendar said where the customer would be standing. The rota was written from the date alone.