The imaginary competitor

Open any food delivery listing in Giza and scroll the photos. Many of the dishes in them have never been served to anyone. A plate from a professional shoot, three times the size of what arrives. A row of glowing reviews written in the same week, in the same voice.

Ask the people behind those listings and the answer is almost always the same. Everybody does it. If they show the real portion and the place next door shows the shoot, they lose. If they do not buy reviews, the neighbour will.

It sounds like realism. It is actually permission. The sentence lets a person do something he would not defend on its own merits, because the blame has been moved to an imaginary competitor who is supposedly worse.

And it is not even true. Customers are not fooled for long. The person who opened a box and found half of what the photo promised does not order again, and tells two people why. The listings people return to, week after week, are very often the ones where the photo looks like dinner. Honesty does not stop a business from growing. It is frequently why it grows.

Most of the decent standards in trade, from honest weights to labels that list what is inside, exist because someone refused this exact argument. They said no, kept saying it, and eventually enough others said it too that the shortcut stopped being normal.

That is the part the excuse leaves out. Refuse long enough and the someone else in that sentence starts refusing too.