The shelf knows which Eid

Walk through a Cairo supermarket this week and the shelf has already written the plan.

In March, in the weeks before Eid al-Fitr, the front of the store was clothes, gift sets, sweets in boxes, the biscuit tins that travel to the visits, and the cash machine by the door was busy with fathers taking out crisp notes for the children's eidiya. A month of Ramadan shopping sat behind it. That Eid is bought.

This week, with Eid al-Adha on Friday in Saudi Arabia, the same shelf is charcoal, foil, freezer bags, the knives, the spices for a meat most households cook once a year. The gift aisle is quiet. The luggage aisle is not. That Eid is travelled and given: the sacrifice, the road to the family in the village or the flight to the family abroad, and, for a great many Gulf households, the first departure of summer.

Two holidays, the same word, different jobs.

The first Eid is hired to show the household in new clothes, to visit and be visited, to put money in small hands. The second is hired to get a family to the same table, wherever the table is, and to put meat in front of people who would not otherwise have it. One wants a shop. The other wants a road.

Every year I watch plans copy March onto June. The same gift-guide creative with the dates changed, the same discount on the same dresses, paced to the same countdown. The laziness is the small problem. The larger one is that the customer is somewhere else, standing in the charcoal aisle with a list, while the car is half packed.

The shelf knew which Eid this was before anyone opened the brief. The plan that copies March onto June is advertising a shopping Eid to people who are loading the boot.