The number on the flyer

On the North Coast in July a restaurant's checkout is a phone number.

It is printed on a flyer, usually A5, usually a little damp, left in a stack at the compound gate or tucked under a windscreen wiper. A photograph of the food, two or three prices, a WhatsApp number. That is the whole thing. No app, no website, no basket.

The delivery apps are here in the sense that the map shows the coast, but the coverage thins past the big gates, and the place that opened for the season in a converted villa is either not on them or is on them with a menu nobody has updated. So the customer does what customers here have always done. They save the number, they send a message, and a person replies.

Then the order becomes a conversation. Is the fish fresh today. Can it come without the chilli. The compound is the one after the petrol station, tell the guard it is for the villa with the blue gate, forty minutes is fine. The person replying is often the owner, or the owner's cousin, and the reply is quick because the phone is in a pocket rather than in a system.

Watch what the number is actually hired to do. A basket would be more convenient. The number is there for something a basket cannot give: somebody is on the other end, somebody said yes, and if the food is late there is a name to message and the name will answer. On a coast where the restaurant did not exist in May and will not exist in October, that is the entire reason to order.

I have been handed a great many funnel diagrams. Awareness at the top, purchase at the bottom, a channel in every box. Not one of them has a box for a person replying on a phone, and on this coast, in this month, that box is where most of the buying happens.