Damien Soitout
The Monday after a national vote, open the counter and serve. The vote does not choose a side for the owner, and the result stays off the till.
The box has done its job. The counter has a different one on Monday.
A national vote is a civic fact. It is also, for anyone who runs a small firm, a weekend that tries to become a personality. The Monday after a national vote, the firm is either open or it is not. The vote does not choose a side for the owner. I am writing on 16 July 2024, in the week after France's legislative second round, and the lesson is not a French lesson. It is what any small workshop, in any country, does with the doors once people have voted. You open. You serve. You leave the result off the counter. The photograph is a ballot box with the lock fastened. The box is finished. Your lock is a different object. It is the lock on the shop, and on Monday it opens.
The dates, so the week is a week and not a fog: the National Assembly was dissolved on 9 June 2024. The French government's notice of that dissolution is the public page dissolution de l'Assemblée nationale. The first round was 30 June. The second round was 7 July, a Sunday. The Monday after that Sunday was the day a bakery, a clinic desk, a repair bench, a classroom that sells nothing but still has to begin, either met the public or did not. A result is a fact for the count, and the count has its own pages. It is not a caption for your price list. If you need a picture of why a vote is a serious public act without turning your till into a rally, the United Nations keeps a plain page on democracy. Read it as a citizen if you want. Do not laminate it onto the counter.
The news page on this site is where reporting and public argument belong: news. A customer who came for a loaf, a part, an appointment, did not come for your reading of the weekend. How to carry the news from far away is a different distance. This vote may have been in the country where the firm stands, or it may have been a vote you watched from elsewhere. In both cases the Monday test is the same. Are you open, and is the thing you sell still the thing you sell? A loud month in the body was the June problem, sleep and the next shift. This is the July problem, the doors. You cannot serve well on a night you threw away, and you cannot serve at all if you decided the result was a reason to stay shut, or a reason to preach.
Opening is not a gesture. It is the hours on the door, the person at the counter, the product at the price you already published, the phone answered in the voice of the firm and not the voice of a thread. If you changed nothing about the offer, say nothing about the offer. Customers can feel a speech that has been waiting. They came to complete a transaction they already understood. Give them that. If something operational did change, a supplier, an hour, a name of who to ask for, say the operational fact in one sentence and stop. “We open at eight” is a sentence. “We open at eight because the country has spoken” is a costume. The country did what countries do. Your eight o'clock is your craft.
I have seen owners close “out of respect” for a result they liked and out of protest for a result they did not. Both closings ask the customer to fund a feeling. The customer may share the feeling. They still have a Tuesday need that your feeling does not fill. Respect, from a firm, is being there when you said you would be there, including for the customer who voted the other way and will not tell you. You will not know which one they are if you are doing the job. That ignorance is a gift. Do not demand a sign in the window in order to feel oriented. Orientation is not the product.
Small business mistakes include speaking in a size you do not have. A four-person shop that issues a political line has mistaken itself for a chamber. Newsjacking is the craft of attaching your offer to a story that is already moving. The Monday after a national vote is the worst possible use of that craft. The story is not a product launch. It is other people's government. Hitching a discount to it is how you look, in memory, like a firm that needed a ballot to remember its own name. How companies adapt when the order shifts is a wider page. The adaptation on this Monday is narrow. You adapt by being findable, stocked, and quiet. The order of the country is not your brand platform.
Staff will want a cue. Give them one on Sunday night or early Monday, before the first customer, and make it short. We are open. We do the work. We do not argue the result with customers, and we do not require customers to celebrate or mourn with us. If a customer raises it, we can be human in one sentence and then return to the order. If a colleague wants to spend the morning as a commentator, the queue is still the job. People are allowed to have voted. They are allowed to be glad or sick about the count. They are not allowed to make the firm's counter the place where the gladness or the sickness is collected as a toll.
You will be tempted by a sign. A color, a slogan, a quote from a winner or a loser, a joke you think is gentle. Take it down. Jokes are how sides get sorted while everyone pretends the sorting is warmth. The customer who does not laugh has just learned that the firm has a side, and that their money is welcome only with a performance. I would rather lose the laugh. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on the United Nations site, is a public text about the dignity people are supposed to keep when power changes hands: the Declaration. I am not pasting an article of it into your window. I am saying the counter is a small place where that dignity is practiced or refused. Practice it by serving the person in front of you without a test.
Opportunities created by a hard public season are real, and they are usually operational: a need that got louder, a habit that broke, a customer who needs the ordinary thing more because the week was strange. Opportunities a crisis made visible is about that kind of seeing, not about harvesting a vote. If you notice a real need on Monday, write it down and answer it next week as a service, with a price and a scope. Do not answer it on Monday as a speech. Seeing a need and announcing a tribe are different speeds. The need can wait until Tuesday. The tribe will do damage before lunch.
The same Monday rule holds when the count you watched was on another continent and the firm you open is here. You slept, or you should have. You open what is yours to open. You do not arrive at work as an ambassador of a result you do not administer. A firm in one town does not become wiser by adopting the mood of a capital. It becomes harder to trust, because the customer can no longer predict the voice that will answer the phone. Predictable and competent refuses to use the customer as an audience. That is the position I want on the door.
If your people are frightened, or celebrating in a way that makes work impossible for an hour, allow the hour and then start. A human morning is not a closed shop. A closed shop is a decision that the public result owns your private promise. Sometimes a promise can move: you said you would deliver on Monday and a street is actually shut, a bus is not running, a school your staff depend on is closed. Say that as logistics. Name the new time. Do not name a party as the reason. Logistics have remedies. Parties, in your mouth, on the counter, do not.
