Every village in India used to have a puncture shop. Usually just a hand pump, a bucket of water, a tin box of patches, and one man sitting on a low wooden stool. Nobody remembered his real name. Everyone just called him puncture bhaiya.
In my village, I called him baba. That's what we called our elders, out of respect, whether they were family or not. He was one of those faces that was just always there. Sitting outside his shop from morning to night, patch kit open, hands black with rubber solution.
You only ever really needed him at the worst possible time. Late at night. Middle of the highway. Your cycle or scooter wobbling on a flat tyre, and you still three kilometres from home. You'd roll up half panicking, ready to pay whatever he asked. That was the moment he had you completely.
And that was exactly the moment he never took advantage of.
Ask him the price at midnight and it was the same price as noon. Same for a scooter, same for a bicycle, same whether you were a college kid counting coins or a man stepping out of a car worth more than his entire shop. He never even glanced at what you were wearing before quoting the rate.
Most businesses would call this a missed opportunity. Economics even has a name for what he was walking away from. He could have charged triple at midnight and people would still have paid, because at midnight you are not exactly in a position to negotiate.
He just never learned to think that way. Or maybe he learned something better.
Think about what actually happens the one time someone does surge you. The cab app that triples fares in the rain. The medicine shop that quietly raises prices during a dengue outbreak. The coaching class that adds a convenience fee right before board exam forms close. You pay, because you have no choice in that moment. But you remember. You remember it the way you remember someone who let you down when it mattered most.
You do not become their most loyal customer after that. You become the person who tells everyone in the building group to avoid them.
Baba was never thinking about a single transaction. He was thinking about the next ten years of your tyres. He knew you would get another flat. He knew you would tell your neighbour where you went. He knew the value of being the shop people trust blindly, the one they walk past two other options to reach, because they know exactly what they'll be charged before they even ask.
He built something most businesses spend lakhs on marketing to fake. A reputation for being fair exactly when it would be easiest not to be.
There was a second thing he did that took me longer to notice. He fixed the puncture even when the tyre was clearly beyond saving. He could have sold you a whole new tube at inflated cost while you stood there stranded and desperate. Instead he told you straight. This one will hold for two months, don't waste money on a new tube yet. He was quietly talking you out of a bigger bill.
That one honest sentence was worth more to his shop than any single sale he lost by saying it.
I think about this every time I'm tempted to charge more simply because someone isn't in a position to say no. A client mid crisis. A customer who has run out of options. A team member who needs the job more than I need to underpay them. The moment gives you leverage. Leverage is not the same as permission.
Fair pricing when it costs you nothing isn't really a virtue. Anyone can be fair on a slow Tuesday afternoon. Fair pricing at midnight, on a lonely stretch of road, to someone who would have paid anything you asked, that's the only kind of fair that actually means something.
Baba never wrote any of this down as a policy. He just lived close enough to his customers to know that the ten year relationship was always worth more than the one bad night.
~Vazhi
P.S. If you have your own puncture wala or a shopkeeper who never overcharged you when they easily could have, reply and tell me. I'm collecting these stories.