Yeah, the solution (although unpleasant to be sure) is to do one of two things: one, become a regular, say, bi-weekly for a 3-4 weeks. Then start calling ahead to reserve things: since you’re a regular, they know you’ll be by and can stop by later in the day when it’s convenient to get stuff. Or, two, put in a sizeable order twice, once each week for 2-3 weeks, and offer to pay ahead. Then you can start reserving what you want and picking it up at your convenience.
Maybe I sound crazy, but I watched what other people did, read Yelp, and mimicked them. After a big Thanksgiving order and Halloween order last year, I’ve had my wheat baguette or batard waiting for me when I arrive every Monday or Wednesday, 15 minutes before closing. Now, that’s my bread-bakery. I have a sweets bakery (Jesus I sound like I weight 400 pounds) too, where they’re not even open on the weekends. Ever. At all. You can reserve huge platters for weddings on the weekends, though. And their hours are like 9-430 weekdays, possibly not Mondays.
But the crappy pizza joint? Yeah that’s fake. But salinqmind’s marble cookie place is 100% legit if the cookies are good. They’ve just got a fuck you attitude since they sell out like hotcakes.
Weird. All the mom-and-pop businesses 'round these parts keep reasonable hours. Maybe they’re not open as much as Denny’s, but enough to suit most needs.
I suspect that the pedestrianized downtown area may be your problem. Non-big-city Americans don’t want to walk anywhere and woe betide the developer or municipality that tries to make them. The businesses in Ye Olde Glendale are probably tired of being open all day for no reason.
If it’s anything like what I see in my neighborhood, the styling places are not only very, very busy over the weekend, but some actually still have customers in the shop after midnight sometimes (Fri/Sat nights, Sun not so much). So, I assume Monday became the default day because (i) they’re probably tired from the volume of customers on Saturday and Sunday, and (ii) that volume of customers probably means that Monday’s the day when the drop-off in traffic will be most acute and therefore makes it logical and less-profit-losing to close up shop.
Yeah, been there. You gotta wonder why they don’t just order it from the online store and tack on an extra ~25 bucks for their 3 minutes of work. Seems like a much better strategy than driving people away with prices that are obviously absurd in the information age.
Anecdote about the ‘target demographic’: there is an excellent little Greek place in Tempe that sells fantastic gyros and Chicago dogs. They’re only open from 11-4 on weekdays. But I bet they make a killing, because they’re near a lot of office buildings and they’re extremely popular for lunch. I surely wouldn’t mind working for 7-8 hours, only dealing with customers for 5 of those hours, and still making 90% of the revenue I could make if I were open 7 days a week.
That aside, shops that keep normal business hours drive me nuts, too. If you’re only going to be open 8 hours a day, stick to the evening. Hell, I’d love to work 1 to 9 again. Thankfully it’s not been a huge issue, as I get off work before 4 and most small businesses I frequent are open until 6 or 7 most nights.
My wife and I were in LA for a wedding, and when we had an evening free, just for the heck of it, we swung by Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. We discovered that all of those stores close at 5 or 6 on weekdays. Their target market apparently is people who do not work during the day.
When my sister and I were there we went into those shops in the afternoon. We had plans to head out for the night and see places like ‘The Whiskey’ and figured we would go very early and beat the crowds. Despite arriving at 9, we had trouble finding parking on Sunset Drive. The night life starts early in LA from what I can tell.
In the city we live in 10pm would be arriving early at a club.
I doubt many of the stores on Rodeo Drive are profitable. They’re loss-leaders; they allow the manufacturer, or other branches of the store to say, “yes, they debuted this item at our Rodeo Drive location”. I think most are “factory stores”, like the Oliver Peoples boutique.
Same goes for Oxford Street or Fifth Avenue or the Place Vendome, or wherever.
Thats a good point. The Porsche store on Rodeo had golf clubs and cutlery sets. That sort of stuff. I dont even recall looking at a car there, and it might not have been big enough to contain one.
You know, between this and the Jobing.com arena/Phoenix Coyotes fiasco, I’m beginning to think that the City of Glendale isn’t particularly smart when it comes to good business investments. :smack:
This drives me CRAZY. I live in an area on the outskirts of Washington, DC that a mere 10 years ago was sleepy farm country, now it’s rapidly becoming full of commuters and families and tons of local businesses. The “old town” area is full of neat little shops that close at 5 or 5:30 PM. The husband and I would LOVE to venture down there after he gets home from work, browse around the shops a bit then go out for a nice dinner but even with him getting home at 4:00 then driving the 20 or so minutes out there we’d have maybe a half hour to shop, then really nothing to do until we’re ready for dinner.
Oh don’t even get me started on the goddamn Coyotes! I’m not even a hockey fan and I want to punch someone in the cock over that. Fifty million god damn dollars, free for the taking if Glendale will just STFU, pretend to watch one last year of hockey and not bitch when it leaves! Arrrrgh! :mad::mad::mad:
Another problem I’ve noticed is that the smaller shops have gotten wise about being open on the weekends, but they close on different days of the week for weekdays. So the really good BBQ place in San Diego is closed Mondays. The really good bakery down the street used to be closed Monday, but they wanted the traffic from the BBQ place, so they changed their ‘closed’ day to Wednesdays. Meanwhile, I as the consumer have to now remember the myriad of random ‘closed’ days for really good places to eat because they are all different. That’s great until I load the car up with co-workers and we go to eat at the BBQ place, but forget it is closed Mondays, then have to scramble to find somewhere else to go. Eventually it gets to the point where you start going to chain restaurants because you can never remember all the ridiculous schedules and give up on the independents who all gamed the system to screw each other and ended up screwing themselves.
Also, I’m not so sure I agree with the fact that you giving me some advice on a specialty product at an independent store automatically means I should shop there. The truth is, yes, I might want you to spend ten minutes explaining the difference between three different $1000+ cameras, but buying online saves me 20% on the price, there is no tax, and shipping is free. I will come back and possibly buy a lens or other things from you, but if your prices are quite a bit higher and you have a shitty attitude because 10 minutes of your time didn’t translate into a huge sale, then your expectations are not very realistic.
Would you prefer if everybody was just closed entirely on Sundays, and maintained the same standard hours every other day?
I think having a mix of schedules is good, and of course everybody ought to have at least one day of rest a week. A block of shops and restaurants in which all but one or two are open on any given day sounds ideal.