The games a music shop will not play

A music shop on a side street in Mansheya, Alexandria, sells guitars, keyboards, strings and sheet music, and lately it has been pulled into a fight it never chose.

Online sellers list the same guitars for a little less every week. A rival shop answers with a weekend sale. Customers walk in holding their phones, asking for the price on the screen. Each round has an obvious reply: match it, beat it, throw in a free case. Each reply makes sense on its own.

That is how tactics work. They present a situation and ask for your best move. They never ask whether you should be at the table at all.

The owner could keep answering, round after round, for years. Plenty of shops do. They become very good at reacting and never once say what they are for.

The other question is harder. Why does this shop exist? If the answer is that it is where a fourteen-year-old gets her first instrument set up properly, where strings are fitted while you wait and a cracked neck can be saved, then most of the price rounds are not this shop's contest. Winning them would not bring it any closer to that. Losing them costs less than it seems.

Saying the purpose out loud is frightening, which is why people avoid it. Name it and you might fall short. Name it and you might succeed, and then you have to live up to it.

A good place to begin is a short list of games the shop will stop playing. Whatever remains once those are crossed off starts to look a great deal like a strategy.