Specialty is the category now

The word on the sign is specialty, and it is on every sign.

I read it on the roastery, on the shop next door, on the paper covering the unit that opens this spring, and on the board of the chain outlet at the corner, which would not have used the word a few years ago. Often it appears twice on one shopfront, once in English and once above it in Arabic.

A few years ago the word was doing real work. It separated the shop from the hotel lobby and the petrol station: beans with a farm attached, a scale on the counter, somebody behind it who could talk about the roast. A customer who wanted that looked for the word, and the word was how the two of them found each other.

It has stopped being a claim and become a description of the category.

The tell is that the signs have not changed. The word still sits in the largest type on the fascia, in the position a business gives to the one thing it most wants said, saying something equally true of the four competitors within two hundred metres. The most valuable line the shop owns is spent on a fact about the street.

This happens to every difference, on a schedule nobody announces. It arrives as a difference. It works, so it is copied. The day it is on every door it becomes the minimum, and no letter arrives to tell the operator the day has passed. The rent does not change. What the sign says is worth less than it was.

I keep watching operators defend the word instead, arguing that theirs is the real version of it. Perhaps it is. Nobody reads that difference from a car.

A difference expires the day the competition adopts it, and nothing announces the day. The shop that has not noticed is paying rent on a word that now belongs to the four shops either side of it.