A cafe sells burgers. A cafe does not stock burgers — it stocks buns, patties and cheese, and a burger is a way of describing three of them together. A signage shop is the same: a roll-up standee is a cassette, a printed vinyl and a carry bag.
An item like that is a kit. It has a price, it sits on the counter like anything else, and the customer buys one. What leaves the shelf is what it is made of.
Why it is one path, not two
Everything sold at the counter goes through the same expansion. An ordinary item expands to itself; a kit expands to its parts; a kit containing a kit expands all the way down.
There is no branch anywhere that says “if this is a kit, do the other thing”. That sounds like an implementation detail and is not: a branch like that is a branch somebody has to remember to write again in the refund path, and in the kiosk path, and in the phone-order path — and the day one is missed, a burger sold takes a burger off a shelf that never had one.
What this means at the till
| The cashier sees | The shelf sees |
|---|---|
| One burger, ₹180 | One bun, one patty, two slices of cheese |
| One roll-up standee, ₹2,400 | One cassette, one printed vinyl, one carry bag |
| One brochure, ₹48 | One brochure |
Components that are services, or that do not hold stock, are simply not moved. A kit that is half goods and half labour takes the goods off and leaves the labour alone.
Where the goods come from
Stock lives per warehouse, and within a warehouse it can be put away in bins. A counter draws from the shop’s warehouse, and takes what it needs from wherever in that warehouse the stock actually is — loose stock first, then bins, fullest first.
Anything reserved is left alone. Reserving is how a bin gets held back for a job, and a counter helping itself to stock somebody has set aside for an order on Friday would be worse than a counter that refused.
A till does not stop to ask which bin, because there is a customer holding a card. That is the one place the counter deliberately differs from a works order, which does ask, and should.
Refunds come back whole
A returned kit puts its components back on the shelf, in the loose slot rather than into bins — there is no telling which bin a thing left from, and guessing would put stock somewhere nobody expects it. Whoever puts it away decides where it goes.
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