The second peak

Draw a Ramadan night by the hour and there are two peaks in it, not one.

The first is the one everything is planned around, an hour or so after the table is cleared, when the whole market arrives at the same minute and pays for the privilege.

The second sits between one and three in the morning, and most plans do not know it is there, because the template they were written into stops at midnight.

What interests me is that the two peaks are not the same demand at two volumes. They are two different customers.

The evening peak is a household. Several people, one screen, a decision taken out loud with somebody's mother in the room. Food, quantity, speed, and a basket that has to arrive at a fixed minute or it has failed.

The late one is one person awake in a quiet house. Nobody to consult, nothing that has to arrive in ten minutes, nothing to justify to anyone. That is the hour the considered purchase happens: the thing they have been looking at for a fortnight, the gift, the subscription nobody else has to approve. Longer sessions, fewer people, and more of them finishing.

A report counts orders. It does not record whether the person ordering was alone, and being alone is most of the difference between the two hours.

Then the part a small operator can use. By one in the morning the large budgets have spent their evening. The caps are met, the pacing has flattened, the agency went home at six in a country two hours behind. The customers are still awake. The bidders are not.

The night belongs to whoever is still open. Which this month is less a media decision than a decision about what time a person goes to bed.