A fruit and vegetable stall

You already know your trade better than any software does. The point of this is narrow: you throw away fruit that did not sell, and you sometimes run out of the thing everyone wanted. Both of those are guessing problems, and guessing gets better when you write things down.

Nothing here costs money. Everything here is done on a phone.

1. Write down what you threw away

For two weeks, at the end of each day, note three things in a notebook or in your phone's notes app:

• the date and the day of the week
• what you had to throw away or sell off cheap, roughly how much
• anything a customer asked for that you did not have

That is it. Two weeks is enough to start seeing something. Most stall holders find one or two items are nearly all of the waste, and that it happens on the same days.

Why this first: every other idea on this page needs this list. Without it you are still guessing, just with a computer helping you guess.

2. Ask Claude to find the pattern for you

Claude is a free AI assistant you can open in a phone browser. You can type your two weeks of notes in as they are — no particular format — and ask:

Here are my daily notes from a fruit and vegetable stall for two weeks. Which items am I wasting most, and is there a pattern by day of the week? Keep it simple.

It will read the mess and give you back the pattern. Then ask the useful follow-up:

Based on this, how much of each should I buy for next Tuesday?

Treat the answer as a suggestion from someone who has seen your notes and nothing else. You know about the wedding down the road and the festival next week; it does not. Your judgement wins every time it disagrees.

3. Sell the day-old stock instead of dumping it

Ripe fruit that will not last another day is not waste yet. Two things that work:

• A cut-price tray, clearly marked, from a fixed time each day. Regulars learn the time and start arriving for it. That turns your worst hour into a reason to visit.
• Ripe fruit sold as a use for it. Very ripe bananas are for milkshake and banana bread; soft tomatoes are for gravy. Say so on the sign. People buy a purpose more readily than they buy old fruit.

Ask Claude for wording in the language your customers speak, and for a list of what each near-gone item is still good for. It is genuinely good at that.

4. A price list photo you send on WhatsApp

Once a day, write out today's items and prices, photograph it, and send it to a WhatsApp broadcast of your regular customers who agreed to be on it. Take orders by reply, keep them aside.

This costs nothing and it does the thing you actually want: it tells you what will sell before you have bought it.

What not to bother with

• Do not buy an app or a course from anyone who cold-calls you about this. Everything above is free.
• Do not put your bank details or your customers' numbers into any website that asks. Claude does not need them and neither does anything else here.
• Do not trust a number that surprises you without checking it against what you remember. AI systems state wrong things confidently — that is not a rare fault, it is how they work.

If you try one thing

Try the notebook. Two weeks, three lines a day. The rest is only useful once you have it.