What comes back in the suitcase

The arrivals hall in the first days of August tells me more about this market than most of what gets called research.

I watch the trolleys rather than the people, and specifically the shape of what is inside the bags.

The same categories come home every year. Shoes bought a size ahead, because the feet will grow before anybody flies again. Medicine, in quantities that only make sense if you do not trust the pharmacy to have it in November. Coffee. A school kit, the pencil case and the labelled water bottle. Skincare in a brand that is available here at a price that is not. A running shoe in a width the local shop does not carry. Something for the kitchen that costs three times as much at home.

None of it is exotic and none of it is unusual. It is ordinary shopping, done four thousand kilometres away, then carried back at the price of a checked bag.

A suitcase is the clearest statement of unmet demand anyone in this region will be handed. Every item in it belongs to a customer who wanted the thing, had the money, was standing in a market full of shops, and chose to carry it instead. That is not a taste problem. It is a stocking problem, a pricing problem or a trust problem, and the household has already told you which one by what it was willing to lose the luggage allowance over.

None of it reaches a market report. The reports count what was bought here. Nobody counts what a family decided to carry rather than buy at home, and that is the only list that names the gap.