The margin nobody reopened

Stand in front of a shelf in Cairo, read the price, then work backwards through it.

Some of that number is the factory. Some is tax. Some is the distributor and some is the shop, and those last two were agreed as percentages, in a meeting, in the year the brand launched, by people who have all moved on since.

Nobody has reopened them, and nobody needs to. A percentage is not a number. It is a standing instruction, and it runs again every time the price moves.

I priced packs in Egypt while the currency was moving under them, and this is the part nobody warns you about. Cost goes up. The shelf price follows, because it has to. And in the same movement, with no call, no email and no approval, the trade's share of the pack goes up with it. Say the shop takes a third. A third of a higher number is more pounds per pack than it was in January, for the same shelf, the same fridge and the same amount of work.

Meanwhile the brand manager is fighting for every pound of that same price. There is a paper on why the rise is necessary. There is a smaller pack held ready in case the number will not carry. There is a negotiation with the retailer about trade support and a slower conversation with the household, which takes two seasons and is never quite won.

Every line in a price has to be defended by somebody, in a document, to a finance team that will ask.

Except the two that were written as percentages. Those move on their own, in the brand's own price rise, and nobody has ever had to make that decision twice.