What everyone else gets

A new stretch of road in New Cairo fills up with shops, and they open looking like one another. Black fronts. Gold letters in a font that is trying to look expensive. A ribbon across the door, an opening discount on a banner, a photographer for the first evening.

None of it is foolish. Each owner looked at the shops already there and copied what seemed to be working. That is how most choices get made, in business and out of it. You look around, you find the middle, and you stand in it.

The trouble is what the middle pays. Copy what most people do and you will most likely get what most people get. A decent first week, a quiet second month, and a shopfront nobody can describe to a friend because it looks like the one next door.

The word everyone hides a small trick. When we say everyone is doing something, we mean most people, and most is not all. The count always leaves someone out: the owner who painted the front white, the one who opened with no discount and a better product, the one who put the prices in the window when nobody else did. They are a small group, and at first they look odd. Some of them fail. But they are the ones who end up setting the look that the next road copies.

It rarely feels like a decision. Following the crowd feels sensible, and stepping out of it feels like a risk taken on purpose. Both are choices. Doing what everyone does is one way to run a shop. It is not the only one, and it is not as safe as it pretends to be.