I remember first time in my life I went to get a pack of Durex. For a young love apprentice like me at a time, it was an embarrassing moment. I went into a chemist in Gdańsk, made sure there was no other customers in store, had cash in my pocket and was determined to get it. Guess what? I bounced empty handed. You might think: didn’t have enough money, the store was closed, they run out, he shied away, and any other reason, which could render economic transaction impossible to occur. The reason I didn’t get my durex was the lady said to me in no uncertain terms, “We don’t stock SUCH antichrist things”.
Fast forward 15 years later, change settings to inner city Sydney / Erskineville, It’s Sunday morning and we feel like eggs and bacon for breakfast. I go for a lazy stroll to a corner convenience store. It’s a private-owned store run by a Muslim family. These guys have absolutely everything which will sell in the suburb. But do they? No bacon in sight. I’ve been there like million times before and I’d bet they sell bacon. I mean, ALL Australian corner stores sell bacon. So I check again, then ask “Mate, have any bacon?”. “We don’t stock bacon. It’s against our religious beliefs”. I dropped my jaw and had this vivid condom-lady flash back. I went to another corner store and exactly same thing happened. Muslim owner – No bacon. So there I was, wandering around Erskineville, pissed off at religion and cursing my teachers who told me that in free market economy supply matches demand. Rubbish!
Economic books would tell you that it’s either insufficient demand or scarcity of shelf space, which make specific product category absent from the stock list. But hey, we’re talking bacon and condoms: cash cows, occupying tiny area of shelf space, sold at a price level / in a situation, where a transaction is least price sensitive.
Corporations, on the other hand, rarely, if ever, reject something for it’s religious burden . If a big business doesn’t sell something which sits in their strategic zone and is bound to bring fat profits, it’s usually due to various government regulations. My company for example doesn’t sell hotel rooms in Cuba. Not because there’s little demand for them (it’s huge actually), but because there’s US embargo on trade with Cuba and being a public company they don’t want to run a risk of negative PR and possible fines. If they could sell them, they would, but they can’t. So, it’s not by choice, it’s by force. I’d really like to see a corporation, which voluntarily, after a spontaneous decision of a CEO drops a category from their portfolio, not in the name of PR-driven social responsibility, but by a personal choice/conviction. (how about tobacco guys? It kills people!).
Coming back to my condoms and bacon situations, though inconvenient at a time, I actually think it’s quite romantic to encounter these isolated not-stocked-here-by-choice moments. It’s a symbol of opinionated individuals running their stores, not mutual fund / private equity shareholders running them on their behalf. Imagine a 7/11 hires this new category manager who comes up to his boss and says “Jack, I’ve just converted to Islam, so I removed bacon from the planogram, we’ll put something else there, ok?”. Now. Watch Jack…
Filed under: (in English), economy, private
