Fresh-produce margins: the honest math of a veg shop
Buy at dawn, sell by dusk, compost the rest. A vendor opens his notebook and walks us through a perishable business, item by item.
The vendor's notebook divides vegetables into temperaments. Potatoes and onions are salaried employees — steady, low-margin, always in work. Leafy greens are daily-wage: bought at dawn, gone by evening or gone entirely. Tomatoes are the mood of the market made flesh.
His margin looks generous until wastage testifies. A crate bought at the yard sheds weight to trimming, bruising and the afternoon sun; what survives sells across a spread of prices that ends with the discounted 7 pm basket and the compost sack. The percentage that reaches his pocket would not scandalise anyone.
The craft is buying right, and it is genuinely a craft. Reading a crate's bottom layer, knowing which farm's cauliflower travels well, sensing when to buy half and return at the auction's end — errors here cannot be marketed away by evening.
Asked about the future, he gestures at his son doing homework behind the weighing scale, then at the QR code taped to it. 'The scale is my father's. The code is my son's. The vegetables don't care. They just want to be sold by Thursday.'
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