The bank that never noticed

Someone who has kept the same bank account for twenty years closes it on a Tuesday. Salary in, rent out, two decades of small, regular, profitable habits. The form takes eleven minutes. Nobody asks why. Nobody calls the following week. As far as anyone can tell, nobody at the bank knows.

Down the road in Manama, the man who runs the shoe repair stall notices when a regular has not been in for a month. He asks after them when they come back. He remembers which heel always wears down first.

It is tempting to conclude that small businesses care and large ones cannot. I do not think that is quite right.

The small shop cares because the owner sees every customer with his own eyes, and losing one is a loss he feels that evening. A large firm has no such eyes. Its size is made of thousands of separate moments: a cashier, a phone call, a delivery driver, a person at a desk deciding whether to bend a rule. Add up enough of those moments and you have the firm.

Which means care at that size cannot be announced from the top. Nobody at the head of a large company can care about a million customers one by one. What they can do is hire people who already tend to care, notice and protect the ones who do, and stop measuring only what looks good by the end of the month.

Large firms have real advantages: reach, money, patience. Most of them waste those advantages by behaving like large firms.

The ones people speak of warmly are the ones that, at the counter and on the phone, behave like the stall down the road.