The fortnight after yes

A woman in New Cairo signs up for a weekday lunch box. The posts were lovely, a friend recommended it, and the first week came with a welcome offer. Getting her to say yes took photographs, a referral and a discount.

Then the first box arrives.

The card inside does not say which dish is which. She cannot work out how to move Thursday's delivery. The message she sends gets an automatic reply, and the real answer comes the next afternoon. Nothing is wrong with the food. Everything around the food is making her feel slightly foolish.

By the second week she has cancelled.

Every new customer passes through this stretch, between the promise that brought them in and the moment the thing they bought finally earns its keep. Most brands treat it as something to wait out. Let the novelty and the money already paid carry people across. Or they hand it to whoever is cheapest and least trained, and call it customer service.

The other choice is a person whose whole job is that fortnight. Someone who messages on the first morning to ask what she does not eat, who rings after the third box to ask what she would change, who answers within minutes and not from a script. Set against what it took to win her first order, that person costs almost nothing.

So is it a cost or an investment? Nobody quite asks, which is why the answer is usually cost.

The customers who would have stayed for years, recommended it at every lunch and forgiven a bad day, are the ones lost here. They left before anyone had the chance to please them.