Even though certain restaurants and convenience stores are still 24/7, I’m not sure if we’ll ever see the return of 24/7 Walmarts and diners, since companies have changed over the years.
However, it also makes me wonder how many job opportunities would be re-created, if certain stores and restaurants were 24/7, considering that some people don’t mind working overnight, especially if they’ve been struggling to find a job in this day and age.
For food service it was always the labor crunch combined with places that for some reason thought that COVID was nocturnal and issued curfews as part of their response to it. I’ve seen a few places get back into it (there are a few 24-hour McDonalds in my metro area, etc) now that wages in that area have skyrocketed. If it’s profitable for a restaurant to run overnight they will. For most, it isn’t.
With retail, the theory was always something like - anything the size of a grocery store or larger needs an overnight shift anyway. There’s people there stocking shelves and doing other things. In theory, you “might as well” just keep the doors and one register open so you can make some marginal sales during this period.
In reality, trying to go to Wal-Mart at 3 in the morning was always fraught, they’re doing stuff like waxing the floors that makes it awkward for the public to be in there, a lot of the people working chose that shift specifically because they don’t want to interact with customers, you can only buy pre-packaged goods and they’re not going to man the deli or whatever so you can’t actually do all your shopping and need to come back during the day anyway, etc. Then, the even bigger problem is that, simultaneously with COVID and not really for any reasons directly connected to it, the U.S. adopted a general policy of de facto legalizing a lot of things that used to be crimes. It’s hard enough to run a Home Depot without thousands of dollars of merchandise walking out the front door on a daily basis even with 100 employees there watching for it at 7AM. If it’s the middle of the night and there’s maybe 2 people with an eye on the shoppers, you’ll just get robbed blind, and of course this will cause a spiral with the safety issues posed to the employees and the legitimate customers by attracting the type of people who do that.
Until we finish the retreat from the refusal to prosecute retail theft, I wouldn’t expect any companies looking at their balance sheet to think 24-hour operation makes any financial sense in that sector.
The grocery store I work at only closed overnight for about the first six months of the pandemic. We’ve been back to 24/7 ever since. Currently we’re the only grocery chain in the area that’s open all night, notwithstanding 7-11 and gas stations and truck stops and the like.
What do you mean re-created? There are a lot more jobs now than there were at the peak of 24/7 openness. That’s why so many more places close at night.
I’m having trouble with a streaming service I just signed up for. Both internet and App have “24/7” customer service. Both closed.
Given that unemployment is currently at 4.4% which is close to full employment, the number of people struggling to find a job currently isn’t that huge.
I don’t think it’s an unemployment rate issue. I think it’s a free market issue.
Walmart, for example, used to have to compete with other chains. They needed to offer better service in order to beat the competition.
Eventually they drove their competitors out of business. Now they can offer poor service that costs them less and get away with it because most people can’t choose to stop shopping at Walmart. There isn’t an Ames or Zayres or Caldors or KMart or Hills or Neisners or Jamesway customers can switch to.
These sound a lot like talking points from the circa-2005 obsession with Walmart in progressive political circles, and they don’t hold up to scrutiny.
60% of Walmart’s sales are groceries. There are lots of grocery stores. Walmart controls about 21% of the U.S. grocery market, which is probably the most any one retailer has ever had, but still means that 4 out of 5 grocery dollars don’t go to Walmart. Walmart isn’t even driving Target out of business and they certainly aren’t driving Kroger or Food Lion or Aldi anywhere. There may be a very small number of rural areas where there isn’t any place to buy groceries besides Walmart and Dollar General without driving 30 miles, but “Walmart has very limited competition unless you have a car, for 1% of the population” is not the same thing at all as “Walmart has no competition anywhere period.” Amazon is also getting very aggressive about its grocery delivery business and wants to fill in its geographic coverage gaps there.
I also am way more willing to shop at Walmart during daylight hours than I used to be, despite having plenty of grocery options where I live. The quality of their products has gone noticeably up because they are really trying to capture the business of people who can afford to go elsewhere and not just be the poor person’s store. I don’t see any noticeable difference in their “service” compared to any other grocery store besides Publix.
I certainly did shop at Walmart late at night at one time, because they were the grocery store that offered that (Food Lion used to be 24 hours in my area but stopped decades ago, no one else ever has been). In my case, they are losing money to competitors because if I have to wait until 7 AM I am as likely to go to Wegman’s or Kroger. Sure, if everyone else was 24 hours they might have to compete, but right now it still comes down to - until it actually becomes illegal again, in practice, to walk into Walmart, load up a shopping cart, and walk out the front door, they aren’t going to deal with the consequences of letting the public into the doors in the middle of the night. I don’t see Wegman’s blinking first on this issue.
Any idea on how your store is doing in the overnight hours? Do you get a lot of customers?
ISTM no grocery store wants to offer 24 hours. Nor coupons. Nor baggers. They’d all love to dispense with that expensive crap. The problem is competition. Once the other stores are doing [whatever] unprofitable extra, you have to too. They’d all love to quit offering 24 hours, but they can’t while their competitors are.
A regulatory change, like COVID closing all the overnight stores, is a gift. Every store can stop doing unprofitable extra stuff with no concern the competitors won’t stop. Nobody has to be the brave one to go first; they’re all pushed off the cliff into the water the same day by the government.
So now that the curfew regs are long gone, some stores are reluctantly tiptoeing back into the water of being open 24 hours. While most are trying their damnednest to make that sound pointless and unpalatable. Because they don’t want to have to do it, and they’d love their competitors not forcing their hand.
It’s a form of non-collusive collusion. As long as they can plant articles in Grocery Store Monthly or whatever explaining how unprofitable 24 hour ops are, most grocery execs will follow along with the conventional wisdom.
Also remember that as to grocery shopping COVID was the big thing that got delivery to be a mainstream activity. If I worked odd hours such that shopping at 2am made sense for me, it’s also the case that somebody delivering my groceries at other more conventional times can be made to work.
How many staff is needed for overnight grocery stores? Perhaps one cashier who might be assigned to restocking when there are no customers. And there may be dedicated stockers in the store all night.
The chain @Smapti works at is “bag your own” (there are two conveyers past the register so one customer can be bagging while the next is being checked out). They only have digital coupons, which are associated with the customer’s login. As a further cost-cutting measure, they don’t take credit cards — a perennial complaint on social media.
(The two in my neck of the woods — about 30 miles north of @Smapti as the guttersnipe flies — are closed overnight, even though the website says they’re open 24 hours and one of them still has “24 Hour Savings” in large friendly letters on the storefront.)
I agree with most of your post, except the above sentence. I find after 7:30 or 8:00pm that one must use self-checkout as good or as bad (looking at you, one particular chain) as it might be. For a couple of items it’s fine, for a cartful, it’s a RPITA because there’s no where to lay everything out to be able to scan/bag it as I want.
And self scan is a pain for produce. The Safeway registers say that they can just scan the barcodes but that often fails.
I imagine their liability & theft insurance premiums vary greatly if they’re open overnight.
There are a handful of stores in the company that close overnight. Those two in particular are in rough neighborhoods where they had a lot of issues with crime and theft late at night. I used to work at one of them back before covid and we had a drive-by in the parking lot, an attempted rape, people having sex in cars, printouts of revenge porn scattered across the parking lot, and other unsavory shenanigans. No such issues in the store where I work now.
Without quoting sales figures, we make a decent chunk of money overnight. We’re one of the slower stores in the company for this area, but compared to Safeway and the like we do a LOT more business.
This. I don’t have the figures to back this up, but ISTM that a lot of things changed with COVID and they won’t go back.
ISTR an acquaintance whose family owned a small chain of grocery stores (they’ve since been bought by a much larger chain) that his dad’s preference would be to stay open until 2am. In California, alcohol sales are prohibited after 2am, and I guess they sold a fair amount of beer late at night, but he (the dad) didn’t see any upside to staying open longer than that. I think they opened at 7am or something like that.
Back when I worked the overnight shift we did a LOT of last-minute beer and liquor sales leading up to 2 AM, which is also the cutoff for alcohol sales in this state. I recall occasions where I was called up to the liquor cage at like 1:58 AM and asked the customers what they wanted, and they didn’t know, to which I had to respond “Well, you have about 10 seconds to figure it out or you’re not getting anything.”
I would love for Harris Teeter to go back to being open 24/7. As a person working the second shift, I always found it incredibly convenient to show up in the dead of night and get my shopping done. But they were already moving away from having that schedule even before COVID came along and messed everything up, so I don’t have a huge amount of hope that it’ll go back.