I’m 9-5 in an office job, an unpaid hour off for lunch at 1. I don’t actually need a whole hour to eat my lunch (and fetch our mail and deliver outgoing mail to the main office) but I take it as I try to do some writing on my lunch hour.
Or run errands. 
At my company, the official office hours are exactly 9 to 5 with a 30 minute lunch. On our time cards we record 7.5 hours of work a day. That’s considered full time. I know a lot of people who work 8 to 4.
I always laugh at the blatherskites who observe “Look at the photos of people at baseball games back in the 1930’s. The men are all wearing ties! This means that people took being grown-ups much more seriously back then!”
No, it meant that people ducked out of the office to go to the ball game. Just because Americans never adopted sietsas or teatime or mid-afternoon wine breaks doesn’t mean we’re totally lost to the concept of creatively fucking-off.
I have a flex schedule at work, which means I work from 7:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. with a half hour for lunch, and every other Friday off. That Friday is a godsend, I usually spend my day running errands.
Having a three day weekend every other week is pretty sweet. Mine is coming up this weekend, as a matter of fact.
Yay!
So, the edited highlights are that if you were an unmarried male working in a factory at any time up until the early 1960s, the only chance you had to actually get anything done was Late Night Shopping or Saturday Morning, and maybe- if you were super lucky and organised- in the 10 minutes after the Post Office/Bank opened and before your Shift Foreman noticed you hadn’t shown up for work yet…
In the US there wasn’t much in the way of late night shopping in the 1950’s and before.
Hm. So the conclusion is that if you were a single man, you better be living with relatives or nothing’s going to get done.
Or a single woman. They existed back then.
I remember when Sunday and late-evening hours for businesses began in Ohio. It was 1972 or '73. A lot of blue laws in localities across the country had to be repealed then. There was an episode of The Jeffersons about that: George Jefferson in New York grumped, “I hate Sundays! Hate 'em!” because he couldn’t open his store.
When local groceries began staying open until 9 p.m. in my area, it was a big deal!
I believe the main push to change business hours came from working women. By 1972 the Women’s Liberation movement had made enough impact that a lot more women were in the 9-5 workforce. Whoops, there goes the daytime business!
See To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America by Lillian Faderman. Before Women’s Liberation, lesbians were more likely to live independently of men. They pioneered the fact that it was doable.
Of course, if it was a 24/7 shop, you’d be on the night shift for the first twenty years or so, and would likely NEVER avoid weekend shifts, which would mean that you would have a weekday free during most weeks.
When I was a wee lassie in Boston, I remember it was a Big Deal to go downtown on Friday night, when the stores and banks were open to 9 p.m. gasp
Actually, once the 40 hour week was standardized, that was not quite accurate. Most (day) factory shifts ran 7:00 - 3:30, giving the typical blue-collar worker an hour and a half to get to the store or the bank (after the bar) before the merchants closed and then there was Saturday.
I recall supermarkets staying open all the way until 9:00 p.m. on Friday nights and they were pretty packed.
I even got a refresher course on that about 25 years ago when I came to Cleveland. At a time when most supermarkets in SE Michigan were open until 9:00 at least six days a week with several hours on Sunday and when Meijers and Kroger and Farmer Jack had each begun opening at least one store in an area either until midnight or for 24 hours, I moved to Cleveland where the stores closed at 6:00 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, stayed open until 9:00 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, closed at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, and were closed Sunday. It was like stepping into a time machine set for the early 1960s. Thursday and Friday nights were horrible, because anyone who did not want to mess up their weekend HAD to shop on those nights. I had not seen such crowds outside of Christmas since before I could drive. (I also found a small, independent grocer near my house who was open until 9:00 p.m. seven days a week and I simply never saw the inside of a major chain store for the next three years until the rules changed.)
My mom worked back in the sixties, when I was a kid. I remember that she went grocery shopping (at two different markets, yet, to get the best prices) every Friday night, taking my brother and me with her. We’d each get a nickle with which to buy a candy bar. (Yes, I’m old.) I didn’t really know much about dry cleaners and post offices and such, so I don’t know *how * she handled them!