Isam is cheerful about answering business questions!

How does the commission market work differently than the over-the-counter sales? He's heard you can make five times as much for wedding jewelry, is that right? Why'd he decide to undercut everyone by so much, as opposed to just being slightly cheaper? Are all forms of jewelry equally straightforward to make magic with his technique?

Commissions vary a lot - usually the customer looks over the inventory and winds up saying they want a blend of this style with that rock, or something, but some people like surprises - those are fun - and some people think they're jewelry designers and will go over and over the design trying to figure it out themselves, and for surprises and for micromanagers he needs payment up front. Five times is an exaggeration - the styles people like for wedding jewelry are fiddly and delicate and matchy-matchy, and now and then an engagement breaks off and you have all this matchy-matchy wedding-looking stuff you have to hold till someone wants a bargain wedding. Isam won't sell wedding jewelry to a groom without talking to a bride, he won't have someone going around wearing jewelry she doesn't like and telling all her friends "yes, this jewelry I hate came from Trilliant". The discount was going to be temporary to see if it drove more foot traffic - he was specifically hoping for adventurers on the cusp of settling down and loading up their brides with wedding jewelry, in fact. And no! For some reason rings are much harder! Isam has no idea why that is but he only figured out rings a few months ago. He can do bracelets and necklaces and headbands and earrings and anklets and all sorts of piercings and hair clips and bejewelled spectacles and has attached spells to all of those but rings in particular were a tough nut to crack.

" - huh, wizards also have to learn rings separately. General jewelry and then rings, they're separate classes and the skill doesn't transfer. I guess that implies that in some way you're doing the same thing they are."

"It's bizarre. I'm good at rings, I've known how to make them for years. Couldn't get anything to stick till recently. Sold all my duds, though."

"The fact you can do it at all is going to ruin lots of peoples' theories of how magic items work." He sits down and studies a menu.

"They can watch over my shoulder as long as they don't interrupt, when I get interrupted I break a prong or squash a link and have to back up very annoyingly." What is on this here menu?

Miscellaneous interestingly foreign foods.

How about this fish thing, that sounds edible.

"I've never been here before," he says, "but the reviews were good." He will get a different interesting fish thing. 

"I live about forty percent on falafel from the place down the block from my shop, this'll be a nice change of pace."

"It is an enormous production for me to go out to eat but restaurants are nearly all really interesting as businesses, they're some of my favorites."

"I don't know much about the industry, what's interesting about them?"

"The economics are very different even for two restaurants right across the street from each other, depending who they hire and where they're sourcing and what they sell and how much table spae they have and what hours people come in, and you have levers to change each of those things but these are mostly small businesses, right, often run within a family, often making odd tradeoffs because they're not paying for labor, they don't typically have the management capacity to change all of those levers and some of them are much easier to track than others, so the typical restaurant isn't run anywhere near optimally but on the other hand possesses the odd stability of a business with lots of levers to pull should the situation necessitate pulling them. You'll see the amount of labor people put in fluctuate wildly but the profits remain the same, because they're optimizing for a certain level of profit not for a certain return on the labor."

"Huh. I have my brother do odd jobs but I shouldn't extrapolate much from him, that's probably not like having a bunch of children you can set to dishwashing and chopping vegetables."

"With children there's not much opportunity cost, right, a brother you're usually at least aware he could have a paid job instead."

"And probably most of the labor in a kitchen is something you can teach an eight year old to do if they're not a pyromaniacal eight year old."

"Yep. - and you can treat that as a constraint itself, right, only making dishes where most of the work can be done by eight-year-olds. This is related to the theory of how slavery distorts labor markets, but the case of eight-year-olds is more complicated because it's not obvious that society should have a goal of optimally allocating the labor of eight-year-olds. As opposed to, say, discouraging it entirely, or encouraging it only if it's in trades that'll be useful to them as adults."

"I grew up on a farm, and I haven't used any of what I picked up there since I was twelve."

"In your case I'm inclined to say that whatever education system produced this outcome worked fine, but maybe we lost ten of you for every one who makes it."

"Oh, I think you got me only very narrowly. Khalil and I don't get along with our parents, I'm not sure where I'd be if we'd wanted to plan to ever see them again."

"Huh. You could in principle run a business like this from anywhere but I imagine it'd be prohibitively difficult to get off the ground."

"They wouldn't have allowed me the apprenticeship, and there'd be no clientele in our hometown to speak of, people got their brides' wedding jewelry from their mothers half the time and if they didn't do that they went upriver to the next town."

He frowns thoughtfully.

"I suppose I could have left four or five years later, and merely be short the head start."