The app's deadline, not the moon's

Ask a restaurant owner when Ramadan begins and you get the honest answer, which is that nobody knows yet, and that it is expected around the eighteenth if the sighting holds.

Ask whoever manages the delivery listings and you get a date that has already gone past.

The apps close their Ramadan submissions well ahead of the month. The set meal, the family platter, the suhoor menu, the photographs, the prices, the preparation times, the hours the kitchen will take orders in: all of it goes into a partner portal on the app's schedule, gets checked by somebody at the app, and is either live on the first night or it is not.

Miss the window and the kitchen can cook whatever it likes. To a customer scrolling at five in the afternoon, that restaurant has no Ramadan at all.

The job that form is doing is the whole month's marketing, and it does not look like marketing. It looks like admin. So it lands with whoever has the password, usually the person who also does the rota and the stock order, in the same fortnight as everything else, and it gets filled in quickly on a Tuesday night with last year's prices and a photograph taken in a different kitchen.

I have watched small operators lose the month there and then spend the whole of it wondering why the phone was quiet. Nothing failed on the night. The offer was never on the shelf.

The month arrives when it arrives, and no operator decides that. The restaurant's Ramadan is a different matter. It began on a deadline set by somebody else, and it closed before anybody in the building had decided what the month was for.