The shop that keeps trying tricks

There is a kind of shopkeeper you can find in almost any mall in the region. I picture one in Port Said, behind a small counter of phone covers and chargers, and he is always trying something new.

One month it is a bigger sign. The next, a giveaway for anyone who follows the shop online. Then a price cut aimed squarely at the shop across the corridor, which answers with a cut of its own, and both end the month a little poorer. Then a supplier talks him into a lit, rotating display that is meant to stop people in their tracks. It stops nobody.

Each move is meant to pay off by the weekend. None of them builds on the last, so none of them adds up. He is chasing the neighbour rather than the customer, which means the best he can hope for is a small win that the neighbour reverses within days. He keeps buying gadgets that promise what he surely suspects they cannot deliver. And having spent so much on the fight, walking away feels like admitting it was all wasted, so he keeps going.

Meanwhile the obvious thing goes untried: becoming the shop people return to. Knowing which cover fits which phone without opening the box. Telling a customer honestly that the cheaper charger will do. Remembering a face. None of it pays by the end of the month. All of it would still be paying in three years.

The sad part is not the losing. It is that he never stops long enough to ask how the year might look if he built something worth coming back for, and let the neighbour have the corridor.