Minimum Retail Price (mRP)

To sell, one needs to be invisible. No business survives on the recurrent sale to family and friends. Businesses survive and grow because they create markets within which strangers can transact with confidence. For strangers to transact with confidence, value needs to be stable and fixed into the form of the product. And for that products need to develop an intensely tangible form. Value of the product starts and finishes with the form. The form cannot be soft or intangible. It needs to be concrete.

To value anything, one needs to have a conversation. The price of a commodity can be arrived at through conversation. But we do not care about the price. Because once we sell, our conversation is over. We do not want to end it. Besides, we will keep having more to say and would like you to have access to it too. These are things of value for both of us. This is what we want to exchange and so, conversation is our currency. We will only transact through conversations.

To buy, one must be desirous. There must be a desire for change, for a perturbation of the status quo. A desire that drives motivation for the mouth to open and the hand to move towards a device that dispenses currency. All this takes a lot of effort. The seller and the buyer both have desires and motivations, but the anxiety of the approach to the final push off of the cliff-face of the mountain of the transaction must be overcome. This is the difficult part. It involves a leap of faith. Can a push be made as effortlessly as possible? Sure. We only need to find a way. Efficiency is a way. We introduce efficiency into the system by reducing steps. If we take away the step of the hand moving, we have already reduced effort. Now only the mouth has to open.

We have made the determination of value into a game. In this game, we will read each sentence in our book to you and we will ask you if you agree. After we have performed all the sentences to you, we will ask you if you feel like holding on to any sentence, or if any sentence led you experience a new kind of thought. If you think so, we will offer those sentences to you. You may, if you like, in turn play this game with whomever you choose to play with, in order to have another conversation. This is the minimum retail price (mRP). You owe yourself that much at least. If conversation is a currency, it wants to grow and spread like a virus. So, why not go forth and multiply?

What will you, the player, win? You win a sentence you can post on your fridge door or your Facebook wall, you win an insight. You win a memory of a delightful conversation you had with us, and which we guarantee you will have again with whomever you choose to play with. This game will give you victory again and again. Are you game?