A student-run shop in a secondary school sold snacks at break. In its first term it lost money, which puzzled everyone, because the shop was always busy.
The students who ran it did what shops do: they looked at the numbers. Three things came out. First, they had set prices by guessing what felt fair rather than by adding up costs. Second, the most popular item was the one with the smallest margin, so the busier the shop got, the more it lost. Third, nobody had counted the stock that went out of date.
The fix was not to raise every price. They raised the price of the popular item by two thousand dong, which almost nobody noticed, and lowered two slow items to clear them before they expired. They started writing down what was thrown away. Within a term the shop broke even, and by the end of the year it was funding the football kit.
The lesson the students described afterwards was not about money. It was that being busy had felt like success, and feeling successful had stopped anyone from checking. The shop had been full of evidence every single day, and nobody had read it, because nothing looked wrong.
Vocabulary in this text
- snack /ˈsnæk/ — a small amount of food between meals
- fair /ˈfɛɹ/ — treating everyone equally
- popular /ˈpɑpjəlɚ/ — liked by many people
- margin /ˈmɑɹdʒən/ — the difference between the cost of making something and its price
- notice /ˈnoʊtəs/ — to see or become aware of something
- describe /dɪskɹˈaɪb/ — to say what someone or something is like
- evidence /ˈɛvədəns/ — facts that show whether something is true