Three stickers deep

On a Friday I read menus in Cairo, and the laminated ones are the ones worth reading.

Hold the card up to the light. Under the sticker carrying this month's number there is another sticker, and under that one the printed price from whenever the menu was made. Three layers on the same dish. On the tea, sometimes four.

The corners are always lifted, because customers pick at them. Everyone does it. It takes a second, and it is the only price history a restaurant publishes.

What the stack says is not that things got more expensive. The customer arrived knowing that. It says the thing the restaurant would never print, which is that this number is not the last one either. Three stickers is a pattern, and a pattern reads as a forecast. The reader is not being told what lunch costs. They are being told, roughly, what lunch will cost in the autumn.

None of it was decided. A reprint costs money and a fortnight. A sheet of labels costs money and an afternoon. Every operator in this city meets that choice the same way and makes it the same way, and I would make it the same way too.

The cheaper document went out. It simply happens to carry a longer sentence than the expensive one would have.

I have never once seen a place peel the old layers off before applying the new one. That is twenty minutes with a thumbnail, and it would leave the menu saying one thing instead of three.

A reprint says this is the price. A stack of stickers says this is the price for now, and you have watched me do this before.