Who stayed in August

Next Tuesday every brand in the Kingdom sits the same exam. The coursework was August, and most of the class did not attend.

Riyadh in August belongs to the people who could not leave. The shift workers, the drivers, the shop staff, the students on summer jobs, the family saving for a wedding in the autumn, the households whose summer is a cousin's house in the Eastern Province rather than a month abroad. The airport fills in July, and the feeds go quiet a week later, because a great many marketing teams left with the passengers.

Every year I go looking for who stayed.

Some brands kept the Riyadh store on full hours through the heat. Some kept posting, in Arabic, to the residents who were still there, with nothing to announce but a summer offer sized for the people who actually needed one. Some paid the drivers what an August afternoon really costs and said so. None of it was designed to be seen. There was nobody in the city to see it.

Now, five days out, the feeds are refilling. The brands that went quiet the day the airport filled are back, in green, with a film and a greeting and a discount. The brands that stayed are also in green. The post will not tell you which is which. The customer can, because the customer was there in the summer too.

Nobody measures August. There is no dashboard for a shop that stayed open, no line in the National Day review for a driver paid properly in the heat. The month has no number, so it has no owner, and a month with no owner is a month a visiting brand is free to leave.

The exam is on Tuesday. The marking was done in August, by the people who stayed, and belonging is what a brand does when there is nobody in the city to watch it.