The scheme arrived on a Thursday, printed on glossy paper. Buy a certain quantity before month end, earn a rebate and a free trip for two. Raman read it twice. It was the best offer his distributorship had been given in years.
He had a good business: a godown in the market town, forty-odd shops he supplied, a reputation for delivering on time. He also had a small voice at the back of his head, which he ignored, asking whether his shops would sell that much.
He hit the target with a day to spare. The rebate was real, the trip was lovely, and for two weeks he felt like a man who had played the game well. Then the godown began to feel smaller. The new stock sat in the back, and the money he had borrowed against it kept its own schedule.
Shops that usually paid within a month began asking for more time. The season they had planned around changed, the product moved slower than hoped, and he found himself offering credit to keep shelves moving. The rebate, he calculated that winter, had quietly been spent on interest, storage and write-offs.
His accountant did not scold him. She simply asked him to put one number beside another: what he earned on a unit, and what it cost him to hold it for a season. She asked how many weeks of sales a full godown actually represented. The honest answer was longer than he liked.
Margin, she said, is what is left after the money has done its time. A scheme only pays if the stock leaves before the costs catch up.
The next year he treated schemes as offers, not orders. He compared each against his own sales by shop and by week, and took the part he could sell. Twice he said no, and the manufacturer's representative was less annoyed than he feared.
His godown had space again. His payables were early. And he noticed that the retailers had started to prefer him for something that had nothing to do with price: he was the one who was never out of what they needed, and never pushing what they did not.