The sale that never ends

A household goods shop on a busy street in Sharjah has carried a red banner across its window for well over a year. Final clearance. Everything must go.

The first week, it worked. People who had walked past for months stepped inside, half hoping for a bargain and half worried they would miss one.

By the second month, the banner was simply what the shop looked like. Regulars stopped reading it. Newcomers assumed, correctly, that nothing was ending. Inside, every shelf carries a red sticker, and a sticker on everything is a sticker on nothing.

An alarm works only because it interrupts something. The banner was urgent when the window had been plain. Leave it up and it becomes the plain window. The eye stops on what is different, and something that never changes is never different.

The seller's instinct runs the other way. If shouting got attention once, shouting every day should get it every day. It does not. Attention goes to change, and a warning that never comes down stops being a warning.

There is a second, quieter cost, and it lands on the shopper. Walk under enough banners and we stop seeing the ones that matter: the genuine recall notice, the pack whose recipe really has changed, the price that crept up while the label stayed silent.

The conditions we should never accept are often the easiest to accept, as long as they turn up every day.