What I Learned From Spending 2 Weeks in Egypt

The family and I went to Egypt for 2 weeks, below are some of my observations.

Note: Some of these observations are not Egypt specific. It just happened to be only time where I was actively observing the world when I went outside.

The Reality of Small Businesses

No matter where you drive, you can always find a small businesses. They usually consist of clothing stores, coffee shops, fast food/restaurants, and corner stores where you buy chips, water, pop drinks, candy, etc. I noticed that the owners of small businesses have little opportunity for upward mobility. You are sitting in your store (usually on your phone) and you are not gaining skills and you are not spending time attracting customers. You have little impact on your business outcomes. You can spend 30 years and you would be in the same financial situation. At least if you worked at a big corporation and spent 30 years doing the same thing, you can become a VP and have a good income for yourself and your family.

Food Culture

When eating with my extended family in Egypt, every time you finished your plate and someone noticed, they would instantly tell you to take more food or pick up your plate and add more food. Even if you were full, they don’t let you not eat. You don’t have a choice. Every meal you have includes bread. The word for bread in Egyptian Arabic is “aish,” which translates to “life.” This shows the significance of bread in Egyptian culture. There are bread bakeries that have more than 50 different types of products made with bread.

Land Development

There are a lot of land that have not been developed (basically a desert) and are filled with rubble. For most people, this land would be useless, but you can take advantage of Egypt’s strong sun, you can deploy solar on that land. In Egypt, only 2% of the energy is generated by solar. This is much lower than its potential. This seems to be an obvious idea and not many people have taken action on it.

Advertising

Advertising in Egypt is focused on physical signs and billboards. As you drive across the country you can see many signs for international (also known as private) school admissions, clothing, and housing compounds (also known as rich people housing).

Education

In high school, your grades determine your degree. Normally in North America (NA), your grades determine the university that you get into. In Egypt, your grades determine your major. If you had a 95, you would be going into computer science/computer engineering. You could of course pick majors that require lower grades than 95, but your parents will not be happy with that. Your parents have spent millions of Egyptian pounds (a decently large percentage of your disposable income) from elementary to high school (since decent schooling is not free) and you studied hard and got the best grades. Now you are settling for less than what you could have got? That’s not an easy conversation to have so people end up choosing the majors that maximize potential income rather than interest (which is similar to NA).

Transportation

In NA, when people drive, there are lanes. Every car should stay in the lane. In Egypt, when people are driving, they don’t stay in their lane. They sometimes drive in between 2 lanes. As result, you can fit more cars in the same horizontal area because the space between each car is minimized. One negative consequence is your traffic gets worse because more cars are fitting into the lanes.

If you wanted to tour Egypt or visit people, you realize quickly you can only do 1 thing per day. Everywhere you go is a long drive. 10km drive might take you between 45-60min at a minimum. Now you have spent 2 hours in traffic going there and back. By that time, you get to the place you want to go, walk around the tourist site, take some pictures, get on some camels, and come home. It is already 6 pm. The day is pretty much over and you barely did anything. At first this gets you disappointed and then you learn to change your expectation.

People also don’t drive with GPS. They just know exactly where to go from their brains.

Tourists

Warning for tourists. You are going to get scammed. Since my family was Egyptian and we speak Arabic, we didn’t have an issue. As I was waiting in line to get into a tourist site, I overheard a local Egyptian talking to a foreigner.

Normally, the place costs about 30 pounds to get a ticket. This guy was telling this non-Egyptian “Normally we charge 300 pounds per hour, but for you, we will make it 250 pounds.” This person was getting scammed hard.

At tourist sites (ex. the pyramids), people will offer you a ride on a horse or a camel. You will later notice that there are 20 other people who can do the same service. Everyone’s competing without having a clear advantage over another person. This is the same situation as the local business. Over 30 years, you don’t gain many skills that you can monetize and you have limited upward mobility because you are working for yourself, not a company where you can get promoted.

When you look at horses, donkeys, or camels. The people that own them have done a great job domesticating the same. If they are left alone without having their rope attached to anything and they can run away, but they chose not to.

Tea

People are obsessed with tea. They have one in the morning, before dinner, and after dinner. If you are bored at any time. Just make some tea.

Everyday Habits

When people are done with work, they come home to watch TV, help their kids with homework, eat, make food (if they are female) and eat. After that, it’s time to go to bed and they repeat. People on the poorer end of the spectrum, sit for long periods at the coffee shops (which are on every street corner). (Similar to NA)

People also have a low bar for classism. Even if you consider yourself middle class, it would be normal to have someone buy your groceries, drive you around, and runs your errands. This isn’t too different if you thought about Instacart to get your groceries, uber as your driver and TaskRabbit to have people do stuff for you.

Cheap Goods

All the stuff in Egypt and other developing countries is so cheap. If you wanted to start a business, you can arbitrage Egyptian (or any developing country) products and sell them in Western countries. You must have a local person do all the purchasing for you, so you don’t get the foreigner tax (mentioned in the shopping section below).

I think most Arab people who do this get cultural things like a pyramids and fabrics. What should do is sell basic need products, like water, cheeses, and bread. Stuff that people consume regularly, instead of specific cultural things. You then sell to the procurement person at Walmart, Costco, Wholefoods and your entire pitch is I can give you X product cheaper than any else. Hard to say no to that deal.

Shopping

When you buy products and people hear a word that is not Arabic or you don’t look like an Egyptian, they instantly raise the price of the product 3x or 4x.

Even if you are Egyptian, they always increase the price by default because people negotiate. The default market dynamic in Egypt is mutual distrust.

From the buyer's perspective — the seller is going to increase the price because he is scamming me

From the seller's perspective — the buyer will negotiate no matter what price I give him so might as well anchor high so we can get to the number I wanted to sell at.

Keep in mind, the negotiation process isn’t tactical like Chris Voss (ex. FBI lead hostage negotiator). There was no “We want a win-win” or let’s mirror the person so they believe I trust them or ask questions to gather information. The main negotiation tactic everyone uses is the following.

You: What is the price of X product

Them: {insert price} Egyptian pounds

You: You think I’m a foreigner? I know the price around here, you don’t charge these prices, stop scamming me.

Them: No no, this is a normal price man, if I make it lower than this then I can’t make a living.

The rest of the conversation is both of them repeating the same information until one of the three situations happens.

1. The seller reduces the cost.

2. The buyer leaves because you are not willing to pay the price.

3. The buyer end up buying at the price they give because you believe they are being truthful.

When watching girls buy accessories, they take a long time to make a decision. The framework is to look at the options (where you usually have 100s) at one local store and hum and hah until you and your friend agree on which ones to buy. If you also have limited money or purchasing power, your final decision is determined by the price. It is not uncommon to see the following. 2 girl best friends going out to buy some cute accessories (because they can). They hop in the store and spend an hour looking and trying different options and they always ask “What do you think?” to the other person. When you ask this question, you are making your purchasing decisions based on what other people would say is good rather than their own opinion. This makes sense, since clothes, accessories, and makeup are all methods of signaling to other people.

Half the time the friend is conflicted about if this is a good purchase or a bad purchase. Eventually, after you go back and forth and try out 50 different things, you have made your decision. I want these 2 {insert product}. In the end, you find the price and you return it because the accessories are too expensive for you.

There is a human algorithm that runs in your mind. You take into account your purchasing power, how much social value you can get by wearing X object, and does that benefit weight the cost. All of this is happening subconsciously and people are not aware of it.

I saw people buying ankle bracelets are the most pointless thing. That is the most pointless purchase. Nobody sees it (so no signaling).

Makeup

People that run makeup companies have an amazing understanding of female behavior. They can sell the dream with attractive models and claim that makeup makes them look like that. In reality, this isn’t the case because most people don’t have a fully symmetrical face, the right size check bones, and hair that glows.

For anyone that says “I wear makeup for me.” If that was truly the case, then why don’t you wear it at home by default, or when you sleep? You use makeup to look better in front of other people. That’s fine. It’s the equivalent of a guy going to the gym to get jacked and have a 6 pack so they can look better in front of other people. The intention is fine, just don’t lie about what it is.

Understanding the Price of a Product

When you buy products in the grocery store in Egypt your brain gets very confused because the prices are so different from your baseline. You can get a box of cheese for $15 in Canada. In Egypt, it would be 100 Egypt pounds. Even though you understand the currency difference and know it is cheaper to buy in Egypt than in Canada, you still think the cheese costs $100.

Garbage

When you walk across most of Egypt there is a lot of garbage on the streets. This does not seem to phase people at all, for people this is normal. If you used all the garbage as input into pyrolysis or gasification, you can create stuff like biochar to fertilize soil, bio-oil which you can turn into hydrogen to refine oil (used to refine petroleum), you can use the syngas gas to power the pyrolysis/syngas process.

Interacting With People Living on the Street

It is common practice to not make eye contact with a poor person so you don’t need to give the person money. The general mental model is if you don’t look at them you are under no obligation to give them money and now you don’t feel bad. If you look the person in the eyes and don’t give them money, you made the conscious decision not to give them anything and now you feel bad. You only chose to make eye contact if you are willing to give them money. Over time, it becomes normal for you to see people living on the street and you barely notice them.

Networking In Egypt

From what I have observed, it seems that functionality is the main reason you are introduced to people. If you tell your friend, I need a person who works in airport customs. You will get introduced if they happen to know the person who can help you with what you need. This could also be wrong since I didn’t have a chance to observe this with people on the wealthier end of the spectrum.

In NA, you introduce people to each other if you believe it will raise your status.

Traveling Problems — Stopped Here Before Leaving

Something I noticed while I spent half my days in traffic in a car and multiple days traveling on a plane was the design of headrests and seatbelts is not great. For the headrests, people don’t get that the biggest problem is your neck. You can rest your head just fine, but there is no curve to support your neck which is not the best consumer experience. With seat belts, usually sitting around your neck/collar bone area, you feel that the seat belt is reducing your capacity to breathe sometimes. This is more of a minor problem, but also not a great consumer experience.

Understanding How To Have Small Talk For a Long Time

One difficulty I had over the last couple of years is communicating with people who were not excited about learning new information. I hated small talk because I believed it to be a waste of time. I still believe it, the difference now is I understand how to have better small talk. The information below was not obvious to me before.

Normal people love showing you stuff from their different travels. When people travel they usually leave souvenirs in their house. If you spend time observing you will see different objects/pictures. It could be a random plastic elephant, or a toy camel. Ask them about those.

Ask about experiences when they were younger. People love to remember old times. You can see this by how often people take photos. They want to save it for the future and want to show others.

People love their pets. They can’t wait to tell you about them. They tend to take care of themselves more than they take care of themselves. They also treat their pets like children.

As you get deeper into the small talk, you then get to understand the problems they face, but you need to work your way to it. People usually don’t tell you about problems because they don’t want to be a burden. To be honest, if you were doing customer discovery to figure out a problem to solve, small talk with family members/family friends is a good method to do it.

Yelling/Getting Angry The Bad Cultural Trait

Whenever people face a problem that involve interpersonal dynamics, the problem-solving strategy tends to go towards yelling. Now you are fighting people’s egos not the actual situation at hand. The winner of the argument is the one who yells more and louder. If you are a calm person who does not get angry a lot, then you will not do great in this environment. When you are not in yelling reaction mode, your input/ideas are not acknowledged at all. This is made worse if you don’t have the authority of being the older person.