Baccalauréat · Série G · Anglais — 2020

Text — The shop that kept no accounts

For eleven years, Madame Zongo ran her shop from memory. She knew what every customer owed her, when they were paid, and which of them would pay late without ever being asked twice. She had never written any of it down.

Then her daughter came home from business school and asked a simple question: how much did the shop actually earn? Her mother named a figure. The daughter spent three weeks entering the numbers, and the figure turned out to be wrong — not by a little, but by nearly half. The shop was making far less than her mother believed, because the unpaid credit had never been counted as a loss.

They argued for a month. Madame Zongo said that a trader who stops giving credit loses her customers. Her daughter did not disagree. She simply asked that every sale on credit be written in a book, with a date.

Two years later the shop has two employees. Credit is still given — to the same people, in the same way. The only difference is that it is now written down, and that Madame Zongo knows, at the end of each month, exactly what she is owed.