The tin that changed colour

One week in Suez, the familiar tin of ghee on the grocers' shelves comes in a slightly different yellow.

Within days the explanations arrive. It is a fake. The company has been sold. The recipe has changed and they are hiding it. Someone's cousin heard it is now made abroad. A few families stop buying it, and a few more buy six tins of the old colour while they still can.

The real reason, when it eventually surfaces, is dull. A new batch of tins came from a different printing run, and the ink was mixed a shade lighter. Same factory, same ghee, same everything inside.

That is usually how it goes. When something surprises us, we look for a story equal to our surprise: a plot, a secret, a coincidence too neat to be chance. But the single thing that happened almost always has a simple cause. A delivery was late. A machine was reset. Someone made an ordinary mistake.

What follows the event is a different matter. Hundreds of shoppers, dozens of grocers, a rival brand quietly pleased, a rumour passing between neighbours and gaining detail with each telling. That part is genuinely complicated, because it is many people reacting to each other, and none of them reacting to the ink.

It helps to keep the two apart. Look at the event itself and assume it is simple until shown otherwise. Look at the response around it and assume it is not.

The brand that explains the yellow plainly, early, on the shelf where the question is being asked, deals with the simple part. The complicated part, the trust and the talk, will take much longer to settle, and no single explanation will settle it.