The face on the box

On a side street in Alexandria there is a family shop that sells biscuits by weight, and the founder's photograph is on every box.

He is still there most mornings, in a chair by the door. He knows the regulars by name, asks after their mothers, slips a child a biscuit from the tray. People come back partly for him. When visitors from Cairo are brought in, they are brought in to meet him as much as to buy anything.

Ask who decides what goes in the tray, though, and it is someone else. His daughter buys the flour, argues with the supplier over the butter, keeps the recipes from drifting, and decided two summers ago to stop making the line nobody was buying. Almost nobody outside the family knows her face.

Nothing is wrong with this. The old man is doing a real job. He is what the shop feels like, the proof that it has lasted and the reason a first-time buyer trusts it. That job matters, and it is not the same job as choosing the butter.

The mistake is outside the shop, in the rest of us. We want the face and the judgement to arrive in one person. We look at whoever is in the photograph and assume they must also be the one steering. When we pick someone to lead anything, we tend to pick the one who looks the part, and then expect patience, care and a long view to come with it.

Sometimes they do. Often they do not, and it is possible to need the face and not get the judgement with it.

The shop on that side street works because nobody ever expected the photograph to do the buying.