An odd business model

 I’ve been trying to imagine the Old Tea Seller’s business.

I would love to know what a professor or a theorist would say about it, whether the Old Tea Seller’s practices could be analyzed in any way that could be discussed at a university’s business school.

The Old Tea Seller did not charge a fixed price for a cup of tea. Instead, he had bamboo donation tubes. One had this inscription:

 

The price of this tea is anything from a hundred in gold to a half sen. If you want to drink free, that’s all right too. I’m only sorry I can’t let you have it for less.

 

A physician named Nagatomi Dokushōan, who wrote a book called Little-known Examples of Hidden Radiance, said that the Old Tea Seller would continue selling only until 20 sen had been collected in the bamboo tube.

Twenty sen a day was close-to-starvation income. The Old Tea Seller wrote repeatedly about being hungry and the humiliation of having to beg. But he also wrote about the joy of doing as he pleased and living as he liked.

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. The inscription is on p. 33.