The afternoon shutter

In the older shopping streets of Jeddah the shutters come down after the early afternoon and go back up in the evening.

Not all of them, and fewer every year, but enough that the street changes character twice in a day. At three it is a corridor of closed metal with the light coming off it. By eight it is a market again, the shopkeeper who was asleep is standing outside with a glass of tea, and the busiest hour comes later than most planning tools believe a day goes on for.

Nobody wrote that in a brief. It was settled by heat, by prayer, by lunch at home, by a father who did it and a grandfather who did it, and it holds because the customer keeps agreeing with it.

Trading hours are the cheapest research available in any market, and the most honest statement a business makes about when it thinks its customer is awake. A mall two junctions away runs continuously from ten in the morning, because that is a landlord's schedule rather than a merchant's, and it tells you about the lease rather than the street. Cairo is different again. The shops on a busy road are only properly warm at ten at night, and a shutter coming down at four there would be closing on the best hour of the day.

None of this is in the deck. It is printed on the door, for anybody walking past.

The plan says awareness, consideration, conversion. The street says open, closed, open.

Only one of those two documents has a customer in it.