The queue for new notes

There is a queue inside the bank this week that has nothing to do with banking.

People are waiting for new notes. Small denominations, unfolded, straight from the strap, and the teller has been rationing them since the middle of the month. The bank knows the queue is coming and orders in for it. In Cairo the exchange shops know it too, and some of them will sell a run of clean notes for a small premium on the face value, which is a market rate for cleanliness.

The reason is that the money given to children at the holiday cannot be creased. A soft note that has passed through six hands looks like spending money, and the gift has to look untouched.

I like this queue because it is the plainest tell on the regional calendar, and two things fall out of it.

The first is that a large share of the week's spending, with the holiday expected around the end of next week, is about to be handed to somebody who is nine. It arrives in cash, in a hand or an envelope, in amounts set by seniority and closeness of blood, and it belongs to the child rather than to the household. Most of it is gone within three days.

The second is that this customer has no card, no app, no account, no loyalty scheme and no delivery address. Every instrument a marketing department owns is pointed at their parents.

So the categories that win the holiday are the ones a child can walk into and pay for with a note. The toy shop. The ice cream counter. The arcade on the top floor of the mall. The shop with the trainers in the window. The phone case stall. The man selling balloons outside the prayer ground at seven in the morning.

Not one of them will run a campaign, and between them they will take more of the week than the brands that do.