A shopkeeper came to us because turnover was up and there was no more money at the end of the month than the year before.
We went through twelve months of their orders with them. The provisions were fine. The problem was two departments: bottled water and plastic housewares, both bulky, both freighted from Male, both sold at a price the island expected. On bottled water the freight was larger than the margin, so every pack sold was a small loss carried by everything else.
The advice was not to buy better from us. It was to stop buying water through Male altogether and take it from a supplier two atolls closer, and to order plastics once a quarter in a nested load rather than monthly. We lost about an eighth of their order value.
Their monthly order with us has since grown by roughly half, because a shop that is making money buys more of everything else. We would rather have that than the water.
