You walk into a small Osaka shop and say, with a completely straight face: "社長、もうかりまっか？"
The owner freezes for a quarter of a second.
Then, on pure reflex, from somewhere deep in the municipal DNA: "…ぼちぼちでんな。" And then he laughs for about fifteen seconds, because a foreigner just ran a 400-year-old routine on him in his own shop.
もうかりまっか = "are you making a profit?" The set response is ぼちぼちでんな — "so-so, getting by" — and the honest answer is never the point. You are supposed to say ぼちぼち whether business is terrible or excellent, because bragging is vulgar and complaining is worse.
This is the greeting of a merchant city. Osaka was Japan's commercial capital for centuries — 天下の台所, "the nation's kitchen" — where samurai status meant much less than a functioning ledger. Tokyo greets you with the weather, because Tokyo is an administrative city. Osaka greets you with your accounts.
Nobody talks like this now. It survives as a period piece, a joke about Osaka that Osaka enjoys making about itself, and that is exactly why it works as a foreigner's move: everyone knows it, nobody expects it, and you have shown you know the city's own myth about itself.
The rhythm matters. もうかり-まっか, ぼちぼち-でんな. It is a call and response. Say it flat and it dies; say it with a bit of swing and you will get the ぼちぼち back every time.
Look at what a greeting reveals. Britain asks about the weather, because the weather is a shared misfortune. Japan's standard お疲れ様です means "you must be tired", because the shared assumption is work. And Osaka asks about your profits, because for four hundred years the shared assumption there was trade. A hello is never small talk. It is a country telling you what it thinks everyone has in common.