Yet when Ralph Bare hung his Romania shirts in the window for $15, he soon had a queue at his counter and started ordering more.
Local cup promotions were urging the town to support Romania and the district to support Georgia, but Bare noticed no retailer in the district was doing the same thing so he ordered red shirts for Georgia too.
He had a sleepless night when a council officer noticed his brand, GQ Clothing, was on the garments, a possible breach of RWC rules. Word came back his one-shop operation was too small to worry anyone.
Day by day he had to order more shirts. Times are tough and a small screen-printing business in the town was happy to keep up the supply.
By match day, they had dressed the town. Among the thousands who thronged a rugby mardi-gras in the square, every second person seemed to be wearing the red or yellow shirt.
The response to the World Cup has thrilled visitors such as Horia Uhgur from Bucharest, one of the few real Romanians in town after following the team to Invercargill, Dunedin and Queenstown.
"The atmosphere is great," he said, amid a sea of yellow shirts spilling from an Irish pub.
That night, when 13,000 filled the stadium, just about everyone had aligned themselves with flags, face paint, paper suits, coloured wigs and, most oddly, the plastic buckets that Manawatu supporters have taken to wearing on their heads when the "Turbos" play.
The game was dire but nobody cared.
The crowd fizzed through a first half with no line breaks by either side, waving flags, cheering wildly when "their" team was given a penalty, enjoying the music and amusing themselves with Mexican waves.
They amazed a big French party who stopped for the game on their route from Auckland to Wellington for France's game with Tonga today.
Parisian Henri Dedieu, sipping a pint later that night and trying not to watch a replay of All Blacks v France on the pub screen, felt the crowd deserved a better game.
His party of 19 - calling themselves the Idiots' Club - booked their trip after the 2007 World Cup in France and they have tickets to a quarter-final where they are fairly confident France can dispatch England. Here's to that. The World Cup is a contest that defines the game rugby will be.
The pool phase has been about much more than rugby. We've seen the power of event promotion and the fun of being part of it. Local bodies, not rugby clubs, have led the way, enlisting business people to form trusts that encouraged retailers like Ralph Bare to look for opportunities. The public have done the rest.
Years hence, if we see someone painting the house in foreign rugby livery, it'll bring it all back.
