From the age of 15 to 17 I went with my father to the Tel Aviv wholesale market twice a week. We bought fruit and vegetables there by the pallet and brought them back to sell in our shop.
The shop sold fruit and vegetables, and we also made our own amba. Everything we bought had a clock on it. Whatever did not sell in time was lost.
The register was the data
I worked the register, at least ten hours a day, and sometimes arranged the fruit and vegetables on the shelves. That is how I knew what usually went and what sat there.
So at the market I helped my father judge what to buy and how much. Most items were bought strictly by how much had sold the week before. The real decisions were the deals.
Taking a deal
Sometimes something was cheap. In winter, oranges and clementines often were. We would buy a whole pallet and sell them at 3 kilos for 10 shekels. Sometimes the same with potatoes, eggplants or sweet potatoes.
A good deal moves a lot of stock quickly. A bad one fills the shop with something you cannot get rid of.
The apples
There were many mistakes. The one I remember best is a pallet of apples we took because it was cheap. They did not sell.
It happened with other things too. Most of our losses came from one of two places: a misjudged pallet, or a fruit that people barely buy. With those, the few customers who do want it also try to haggle you down.
The rules I came away with
Never take a deal unless you are completely sure you can at least break even.
Try to secure bulk clients for a deal, and call them before you buy if you need to.
Never buy blindly something restaurants cannot use, like apples. Never. Unless you plan to make them into jam.
Going alone
At 15 I did not know much. Towards 16 I already knew a lot. By 17 I knew enough that once, when my father had to stay in the car, I went into the market alone, talked with the dealers and the workers, placed the order and came back. It is a dangerous place to walk around: the drivers there move like crazy.
During COVID, when my family got sick, I ran the shop alone for a day or two, until I caught it too.
None of it looked like engineering then. Looking back, it was demand forecasting with perishable stock and my own family's money, decided twice a week.