The price of kahk

In the last week of Ramadan the pavement outside a Cairo bakery tells me more about the year ahead than any study I could pay for.

The biscuits are for Eid. Every household either bakes them or buys them, and which of the two happens is most of the story. Butter, sugar, flour, and something for the middle if the year allows it. Nothing in that list is exotic, and every item in it has moved with the currency. I managed brands through enough of that movement to know the tray is where it stops being a chart.

So the price per kilo chalked up on the board is not the baker's opinion. It is the exchange rate, arriving inside a household in a form the family can argue about.

What I read is not only the number. It is the queue. How long it is, at what hour, and what people leave holding. Whether the box is a kilo or a half. Whether the plain ones are moving while the filled ones sit. Whether the grocer two doors down is out of butter and flour, which means the labour has gone back into the house to buy the difference.

An hour on that pavement gives me the ceiling: what a family here will pay this year for something they are not going to give up. Every category I work in is priced under that ceiling, whether the pricing meeting knows it or not.

The panel study costs money, arrives in a quarter, and puts the caveat in the appendix. The queue costs nothing, forms every evening this week, and has already decided.