A famous ancient Chinese story features a monkey-keeper. He gives the monkeys four bananas in the morning and three in the evening. The monkey are angry, feeling they’ve been short-changed. So the monkey-keeper changes it to three bananas in the morning and four in the evening. The monkeys are happy.
I’m reminded of what had happened at the grocery store my grandmother used to run on her coconut plantation near the now-Changi International Airport.
At the front of the store were sacks of things like rice, dried beans, dried shrimps, dried whitebait, which stood open at the mouth to make it easy for the shop assistants to scoop up and weigh. Some of the customers from the kampung* nearby would snatch an extra handful of these things on their way out.
At the front of the store were sacks of things like rice, dried beans, dried shrimps, dried whitebait, which stood open at the mouth to make it easy for the shop assistants to scoop up and weigh. Some of the customers from the kampung* nearby would snatch an extra handful of these things on their way out.
The shop assistants came up with a solution: weigh up the purchase item just short of one handful, so that when these cheating customers grabbed an extra handful, they would think they’d got the better of the store but the store would not lose out.
*Malay / Indonesian word for “village”; also "kampong".
(Singapore, 1960s)
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