What the grocer knows

He knows the week before school starts will empty the shelf of small juice cartons and lunchbox biscuits. He knows the first cool weekend sells soup packets and bread rolls. He knows which tins move only when the month's salaries have landed, and which sell regardless.

Ask him how, and he shrugs. He just knows.

He does, in a way. Years of watching the same street have left him with a picture of how it shops. The picture is right most of the time. But it lives only in his head, it bends with his mood, and it leaves the counter whenever he does, on the day he takes a month off and his nephew minds the shop.

What he calls a feeling is really a theory. It is a set of claims about cause and effect: when this happens, people buy that. He has simply never said them out loud.

Say them and something changes. Written on the back of an invoice pad, the first cool weekend means double the soup, the hunch becomes a rule someone else can follow, test and argue with. If it is wrong, the nephew finds out in a fortnight instead of a decade. If it is right, it survives a slow week instead of being doubted by the very man who held it.

The words do not make him less of an expert. They make his expertise something that can stand behind the counter without him.