There is a fruit stand on Highway 7. It sells bananas.

This was not the plan. The stand was built for apples. The shelving was designed for apples. The original owner knew apples. The sign, if you look closely, still says “Apple Stand” under the vinyl banner that reads “TROPICAL FRUIT EXPERIENCE.”

Five employees work there now. One monitors humidity. One hand-fans the bananas when the AC breaks, which is often. One rotates stock constantly because bananas have a three-day window between “not ripe” and “compost.” One handles customer complaints. One updates the spreadsheet that tracks which bananas are about to turn so they can be sold at discount before they become unsellable.

Lunch is banana sandwiches. There is a lot of overripe inventory to work through.

Nobody remembers deciding to sell bananas.

How It Happened

It started with a customer.

“Do you have bananas?” she asked. The owner did not have bananas. But he knew a guy. So he made a call, got a case, and sold them at a nice markup. Easy money.

A vendor noticed the bananas and made an offer. “I can get you a banana rack. No charge. Just commit to a monthly order.” The rack was free. The bananas were cheap. The margins looked good on paper.

The margins did not account for the humidity requirements. Or the shelf life. Or the fruit flies. But by the time these became visible, the rack was installed and the monthly order was locked in.

Someone read an article about banana consumption trends. “Bananas are the future,” it said. “Apples are flat. The growth is in tropical.” The owner shared this at the Monday meeting. Everyone nodded. Growth sounded good.

The AC was installed that summer. Not because the stand needed climate control, but because bananas need climate control. The AC unit cost more than the stand’s entire first year of apple revenue. It was financed.

New hires came in who had never sold apples. They were banana people. They knew banana logistics, banana customer expectations, banana supply chains. They looked at the old apple shelving and asked why it was still there.

The apple shelving was removed to make room for more banana racks.

Present Day

The stand now has five full-time employees, a financed AC unit, a humidity monitoring system, a rotating stock protocol, a discount pricing algorithm for near-spoilage inventory, and a monthly vendor commitment that cannot be exited without penalty.

It sells bananas.

The owner works sixty hours a week managing complexity that bananas require. Margins are thinner than apples ever were. But there is no going back. The apple suppliers have moved on. The apple shelving is gone. The employees do not know apples. The entire operation has been restructured around a fruit it was never designed to sell.

The owner sometimes drives past an apple stand on Route 12. One guy works there. He sells apples. The stand closes at five. The owner is usually home for dinner.

The Stand on Route 12

The Route 12 stand makes more money. The owner is not smarter. Apples are not inherently better than bananas. Bananas are fine. Some stands sell bananas very successfully.

The difference is that when someone first asked “do you have bananas?” the Route 12 owner said no.

When a vendor offered a free banana rack, he declined. When someone shared an article about banana growth trends, he shrugged. When a customer complained that the stand down the road had tropical options, he nodded politely and sold her apples.

He did not do this because he hates bananas or because he is allergic to growth or because he failed to read the articles about tropical fruit trends. He did it because he looked at his stand, which was built for apples, and asked a simple question:

“Why would I sell bananas?”

He never got a good answer.

The Question Nobody Asks

The Highway 7 stand did not fail because bananas are bad. It failed because nobody asked the question.

Every step made sense in isolation. The first banana sale was pure upside. The free rack was free. The AC was necessary once the bananas arrived. The new hires were qualified. The apple shelving removal was practical.

No single decision was wrong. But no single decision was evaluated against the question: “We are an apple stand. Why are we adding banana requirements?”

By the time the question became obvious, it was too late. The stand had accumulated so many banana dependencies that unwinding them would cost more than continuing forward. So they continued forward. Into humidity sensors and hand-fanning shifts and banana sandwich lunches.

This is how drift works. Not through one bad decision, but through a thousand reasonable ones that nobody connects to the original design.

In infrastructure terms, this is how you end up running Kafka, Kubernetes, and a feature-flag service to serve a CRUD app.

The Person Who Asks

The Route 12 stand has one employee. But it also has something the Highway 7 stand lost: someone who keeps asking why.

He faced the same pressures. The same vendors, the same customer requests, the same articles. He just said no.

He does not say no because he enjoys it. He says no because he has seen what happens when nobody does.

The Highway 7 stand is the default outcome. Without someone whose job is to ask “why would we do this?”, every organization drifts toward bananas. Not because bananas are bad. Because bananas are new, and new feels like progress, and progress feels like survival.

The person who asks is not popular. The banana vendor does not enjoy being questioned. The customers with tropical preferences do not enjoy being declined. The employees who read growth articles do not enjoy being told that growth trends do not automatically apply.

You Are Definitely a Banana Stand

You are a banana stand if you have more people managing infrastructure than building product. You are a banana stand if your deploy pipeline requires a dedicated team to babysit. You are a banana stand if new hires spend their first month learning workarounds instead of the system. You are a banana stand if “we’ll fix it after launch” appears in your retrospectives more than once a quarter. You are a banana stand if the people who remember why things were built this way have all left.

Look at your infrastructure. Count the systems that exist because someone read an article, or a vendor made an offer, or a customer asked once, or a new hire brought their preferred tooling. Count the complexity that requires dedicated headcount to manage. Count the things that break when the AC goes out.

Now ask: what were you actually built to do?

Most organizations cannot answer this question anymore. The apples are gone. The apple shelving was removed years ago. Everyone currently employed is a banana person. The institutional memory of what the stand was designed for has been lost.

This is a failure of stewardship. Nobody’s job was to ask the question. So nobody asked.

The Way Out

There is a path forward. It starts with a question most organizations refuse to ask.

What do you want to be?

Not what you started as. Not what you drifted into. What do you actually want to be, knowing what each choice costs?

If you want to be a banana stand, be a banana stand. Own it. Budget for the AC. Hire for humidity expertise. Stop being surprised when tropical fruit requires tropical infrastructure. The Highway 7 stand is failing because it sells bananas while pretending it is still an apple stand, with apple budgets and apple expectations and apple-stand hours.

If you want to be an apple stand, the bananas have to go. Not revisited. Not refactored. Gone. Sunk cost is sunk. Continuing to hand-fan fruit because you already bought the humidity sensors is denial with a spreadsheet.

Either path is valid. What is not valid is refusing to choose.

The steward is not the person who always says no to bananas. The steward is the person who forces the question before another rack gets installed. Who asks “are we deciding to become a banana stand?” when the vendor shows up with a free display. Who makes the cost of drift visible before it becomes the cost of unwinding.

There is always money in the banana stand… for the guy selling banana cooling systems.

Meanwhile, the apple stand on Route 12 closes at five.

boring (n.): Knowing what you sell and refusing to drift into someone else’s inventory.