Unfortunatly, it’s important to remember that things work the other way around too.
If it’s 3:00AM and we plan on closing our casino (yes, some casinos actually close) at 4:00AM. If all you’re betting is $3 a hand, we might not stay open for the full hour. Minimum staff to keep the casino open is >$50/h in payroll alone. $3 is not enough play to make it worth it. If we stay open, it is purely from a customer relation standpoint.
…but don’t be supprised if we close down. We want to go home after work just like you do.
The officer asked me how long I’d been living in Arizona and I said “Ummm, I guess it’s been quite awhile . . .” (It had been 2 years.) And then he asked me why I didn’t have an Arizona driver’s license and I said “Sir, I work the same hours the DMV is open.”
He thought about it for a second and then basically told me that sucks, just try to get one as soon as I could, and have a nice day.
Or they’re owned by Italian-Americans - at least that’s the case in my neighborhood.
The Asian adn Russian grocery stores? Open late. Businesses owned by Orthodox Jews? Closed for Shabbat, but otherwise accessible the rest of the week. The Italian groceries, bitchers, religious goods stores, and so on? Monday to Friday, 10 AM to 5:00 PM, and maybe a couple of hours early Saturday morning. They’re all places that look like they’ve been around forever, too.
BTW, I wish I still had the photo I took of the posted business hours of a pizzeria in Buffalo’s Kaisertown neighborhood. Every day the hours were different. Literally, every day. The sign read like:
This issue gets me so riled up!! It seems everything is catered to housewives and retirees who can shop whenever they please. But what about us working folk? We have to take off time from work to complete ordinary and necessary tasks like filling prescriptions, going to the DMV, going to the doctor, etc. It SUCKS!
One of my rants is that my local yarn stores are never open past 5 or 6 pm on weekdays and never open on Sunday. So I have to take time off work, or schedule my Saturday around going to the yarn store. What, do they think all knitters are housewives or grandmas? Not this knitter. I WORK and I therefore I have lots of MONEY to spend in your store. Too bad you lose out on it because your hours suck. I just buy online.
Any why do we still have these ridiculous throwbacks to the olden days where everything closes early on Sundays? Damn that irritates me! Sunday evening would be one of my favorite times to shop but no, everything is closed. These stores have no idea how much money they are losing out on by being closed.
I spent some time in Austria a while (decade…I guess) back. Only resteraunts were open late. Most stores were open on saturday morning closing at noon. At that time there was a contriversial “long shopping saturday” once a month, when the stores would stay open later…3-5 depending on the store. As you can imagine this was very unpopular with store clerks, and wildly popular with everyone else.
HOWEVER, at least the folks I was working for/with had a solution: It was perfectly acceptable to take time off work to shop, get your hair cut, whatever.
It was also normal for people to stop at the grocery store over lunch and have a couple of bags of groceries, case of beer, whatever in thier office all afternoon.
So it may be a case of the merchants with extended hours raising our expectations, and those of our employer, who will look at taking a long lunch to go shopping as frivilous, rather than necissary and normal.
We were in Germany in June, and it was hotter than hell the week we were there in the Black Forest area. We’d be driving around through little villages, our tongues hanging out for some of the stupendously good local beer, and although we saw numberless little inviting beer signs inviting us to drink at picturesque little cafes, they were all closed. This was at about 2:30 p.m. on a blisteringly hot Thursday or Friday. Eventually we reached a Freudenstadt, a larger town, and finally found one open cafe and had a couple of glasses of delectable Alpirsbacher (which beer was worth the wait, BTW).
WTH? Wouldn’t midafternoon on a freaking hot summer day be the ideal time to open a beer hall? Silly me, I guess. Maybe Germans only drink after the sun goes down, or something.
A case of different habits: when the sign features a beer brand it’s usually for a restaurant, which is open for lunch (2:30 pm is much too late for that) and then for dinner (from about 5 or 6 pm). You might well have had more success looking for a café (sign not featuring a beer brand as their typical guests prefer a genteel coffee-and-cake midafternoon snack (but you can of course order beer)).
There are restaurants (usually smaller and family-owned) in the US that also close between lunch and dinner. There are some that are only open for dinner and skip lunch altogether, as well.
That makes sense, because you can save overhead on a limited menu, as well as on payroll. But how many cooks and waitresses are going to want to come in for two hours for lunch, go home for two hours, then come back for dinner?
Like I’ve said, the ones I’ve seen are generally family owned, and so basically everyone working there is part of the family. The entire family works and during the hours the restaurant is closed, all of them pitch in to clean, change linens, wash dishes, and prep for the dinner crowd.
But if you are there working anyway, wouldn’t it make business sense to, well, do business to offset the overhead? What is the advantage of closing for two hours?
Yep, you make a very good point. This is why most restaurants continue to remain open between lunch and dinner. Though the 'Closed between" model is less and less common these days, it is still around.
There’s a sushi shop near me that does this. The place is empty (no workers) between lunch and dinner. They even do this on weekends, when foot traffic is very high.
Around here, tons of places are closed between lunch and dinner, especially downtown. (Our downtown is pretty much dead after 5.) It’s a real pain, because when I work evenings we get dinner at 4:30, and most places are either closed or closing then.
There are restaurants (usually smaller and family-owned) in the US that also close between lunch and dinner. There are some that are only open for dinner and skip lunch altogether, as well.