Before I went to the wholesale market with my father, there was an earlier job. From about 14 to 15, maybe even from 13, we made things and sold them to other shops.
My father usually made amba, with workers helping. We also had a worker who made baklava. We packed it all and drove around, usually from shop to shop.
Shop to shop
At each stop I got out with the goods, and a worker went another way, each of us going from shop to shop alone, trying to sell.
I was very shy in those days. I walked in timidly, held out what we had, and tried to sell it anyway.
Returns
We had returns, and I always hated them.
Shops would return baklava that looked ugly, probably because they had kept it somewhere with a lot of heat. Once it looked like that there was no fixing it and no reselling it. It went in the trash.
That was the lesson I did not have words for yet: once a product leaves you, how it is stored is no longer yours to control, but the loss can still come back to you.
The torshi
We also sold pickles, torshi among them. Torshi does not only stink. Sometimes a jar opened during the drive, and that was very bad, because it has turmeric in it. Turmeric does not only smell, it stains whatever it touches.
So the drive itself was part of the product. A jar that opened on the way cost more than the jar.
The jars cost more than you think
We bought jars in bulk, and that is where I saw something strange. For one particular shape we used for amba, glass cost less than plastic. It made no sense, until we understood why: there was too much supply of that shape in glass.
Price follows supply, not what the material looks like it should cost. And packaging is real money. Sometimes the package cost more than half as much as the product inside it.
Distilled water
One more thing we learned making amba: made with distilled water, it lasted much, much longer than made with regular tap water.
For a product you sell to shops and cannot control after it leaves you, shelf life is not a detail. It decides how much comes back.
Good days
A shy kid walking into shops to sell baklava, and a car that smelled of torshi. Ah, good days.