The sale he says he needs

A man runs a small shop selling headphones and speakers in a mall in Manama. Every weekend for four years he has cut his prices by a fifth. He says he has to. His customers expect it, and without the sale, he says, the shop would be empty.

Two floors up, a woman sells much the same things at full price. She has never run a weekend sale. Her shop is not empty.

That does not prove his customers would stay without the discount. It proves something narrower: a shop like his can live without one. So the sale is not a requirement of the business. It is a habit he formed and then started calling a need.

The difference matters because needs are not up for discussion. If something is truly necessary, there is no point asking whether to keep it. Habits deserve the question. They began as choices, often sensible ones, and carried on long after anyone checked why.

Calling a habit a need is comfortable. It turns a decision into a fact of nature, and facts of nature are nobody's fault. Meanwhile the sale has taught his regulars to wait for Friday, his margin has thinned, and he can still say he had no choice.

The test is not complicated. Find someone in the same position doing well without the thing you swear you cannot drop. If they exist, the thing is a want with a better argument attached.

He may still keep the sale. But then it would be a decision, and it would be his.