The school run daypart

The Gulf schools are reopening around now, this week for some and next week for others, depending on the school. Nobody in a marketing department marks the date. Every cafe on a school road knows it to the morning.

Stand outside a coffee shop near a school gate in Riyadh at a quarter to seven. In July there is nobody. In the last week of August there is a line of cars, a father with the window down, two children in uniform in the back, an order that has to be in hand within four minutes or the gate closes. The drive-through is full and the dining room is empty. By half past eight it has gone, and it will be back tomorrow, and the day after, until June.

That is a daypart. It has its own product, coffee and something a child will eat in a car, its own speed, and no tolerance for error. Over a year it is worth more to that cafe than the whole summer, and it turns on two things no brand deck mentions: whether the place is open at half past six, and whether the order is ready when the car reaches the window.

I have sat with enough F&B plans in this region to notice what is never on them. Ramadan is. National Day is. The weekend brunch is, because that is where the photographs come from. The school run is not, because it needs no ad, it does not post, and it shows up, if at all, as an odd bump in the early hours of the till report.

The footfall a restaurant pays for is the footfall it has to persuade. The footfall a cafe gets for nothing will drive past if the shutter is down at a quarter to seven.

The most reliable customer in the Gulf is a car with a child in it, at ten to seven, and no plan has ever been written for that car.