The Friday reply

On a Friday afternoon I sometimes message a business I have no intention of buying from, just to see how long the reply takes.

Nothing about the hour says answer me. Lunch is long, the family is in one room, the phone is face down on a table somewhere in the house.

Some replies come back inside a minute. Not a template and not an away message. A real sentence, often a voice note, sometimes a photograph of the thing sitting on a counter with a price under it.

Others come back on Sunday morning with an apology and a menu.

The minute is the tell, and it is not a service level. It is the owner. Nobody rosters a reply like that. No agreed response time produces it. It happens because the person whose name is on the licence cannot stop looking at the phone, and cannot stand the idea of a stranger being ignored.

Which is why the day it slows down deserves more attention than the day it was fast.

There are only two reasons a Friday reply gets slower. Either the business grew, and there is a team now, and a shift that ends at six, and Friday belongs to somebody who is paid to be there. Or it stopped growing, the owner has quietly let go of the phone, and there is nobody behind it at all.

From outside, those two look identical. Same silence, same apology on Sunday, same polite line about working hours.

I have never found a way to tell them apart from the message thread. The tell that told me everything a year ago tells me nothing now, and it went quiet in exactly the same way whether the business was getting bigger or ending.