Week 2 Round: First census — who is a regular?

Return to your week 1 place and count. The question is whether "regular" is something you can observe or only something people claim.

4 March 2027

Same place. Same day of the week. Same hour. This is the first thing most fieldwork gets wrong, and it is easy to get right: if you change the time, you have not observed the place twice, you have observed two places once each.

Before you go in, write down your rule. What will make you count somebody as a regular? Recognising them from last week? The staff greeting them by name? Them not looking at the menu? Whatever it is, commit to it on paper first, because a rule you invent while counting will bend towards the answer you expected.

Then count. Total heads. How many you recognise. How many are alone. How many the staff speak to unprompted.

Afterwards, find the case your rule got wrong — there is always one. The person who was clearly a fixture and failed your test, or the stranger who passed it. That failure is the useful part of the exercise. Baumeister and Leary need frequent interaction, and you have just discovered how hard frequency is to see from inside a single room.

Bring both numbers and the broken case.