I get that correlation does not equal causation but assuming that the pandemic put an end to some stores like Walmart being open 24 hours, why? If they weren’t profitable operating at those hours, why did it take COVID for them to realize it? If they were profitable, why don’t they go back to it?
Staffing problems: people don’t want to work those hours.
Plus, possibly, reduced demand for 24-hour shopping, as some of the people who had to switch to online shopping found they liked it, and never went back.
The store I work at is now the only 24-hour grocery store left in this entire county. During most of 2020 we were closing overnight like everyone else (especially in the beginning we needed time to stock without the hordes picking us clean), but we went back to being open all night once vaccines started coming out.
We have to have 15-20 people in the building to stock anyway, may as well add one more to ring people up.
24 hour shopping was already on the way out due to the tightening labor market. Covid may have accelerated things somewhat, but it was already more expensive to hire someone to work in 2019 than it had been in 2018, etc. My grocery store went to 24 hours during the depths of the recession, but they had been cutting hours for several years before the pandemic.
Covid brought forward a lot of failures of businesses and business models that were always going to die. In some ways it just got the inevitable over with.
Off-topic, hidden
Did the same thing to a lot of elderly people too.
Now and the next couple of months is the 5 year anniversary of when COVID burst on the world scene. Certainly it killed many young people. But an honest assessment of many of the elder deaths would suggest they probably would be gone by now had COVID never existed. Which is not mean to trivialize their death or suffering. Just pointing out a statistical fact.
IANA retailer, but I have run businesses.
Once post-COVID “normalcy” had returned I wonder how much the big corporate stores noticed that 1) total sales (including their online division) did not decline, 2) shoplifting & police calls for troublesome customers in the wee hours went way down, and 3) staffing costs went down.
IOW, they had unwittingly been delivering a convenience to customers for no benefit to themselves. So when the natural experiment of COVID-forced overnight closings concluded, they analyzed the results and ran with it.
There are lots of examples in business of competing companies doing convenience things to their detriment only because they’re afraid to stop while all their competitors continue whatever costly practice. They’d love to collude to agree to all stop doing it but that is both illegal and often wildly impractical.
Once everyone is forced to change more or less simultaneously by external forces, then they’re less worried about needing to restore the former convenience if / when that becomes possible again.
A similar example might be in an area that had banned disposable plastic shopping bags then a few years later lifted the ban. Stores may well find the customer base has gotten used to BYOBag and stores face no pressure to go pack to giving away mountains of plastic bags and the dollars they represent.
Not to mention there is money to be made from selling bags to customers. I swear those things turn into coat hangers and so have to be replaced regularly. Now, if I could turn the coat hangers into bags…
I wonder if the expansion of delivery services during Covid helped reduce the need for 24-hour shopping.
Way back in 2005, this phenomenon was highlighted by the children’s show SpongeBob SquarePants, specifically the episode “Fear of the Krabby Patty”.
Plankton advertises that his restaurant, the Scum Bucket, will be open for 23 hours a day. He only does this to trick the Krusty Krab to open for 24 hours a day, so he can try to steal the Krabby Patty Secret Formula once the employees are exhausted.
I was also thinking that WFH (Work From Home) gave people more flexibility in their schedules.
Better/easier to sneak out at lunch to grab a few things than to have to do it at 3am??
Similarly, I noticed a lot of bars and restaurants started closing earlier, especially their kitchens. My theory was that they got good at understanding the times that they actually profited vs. losing money or breaking even. I
In many cases, they leave the bar open for drinks, but just shut their kitchens down earlier. I just wonder how much they considered losing late customers who, knowing the kitchen would be closed, don’t even going in.
SpongeBob SquarePants addressed this point too, in a separate, 2002 episode of the show that was also about the Krusty Krab opening for 24 hours:
(Although Patrick was keeping his Krabby Patty under his pillow, so even he might not want to make a middle of the night trek to the Krusty Krab for a fresh burger).
That’s my guess too. People shifted their shopping patterns from off-hour shopping at 24-hour stores to off-hour online shopping with delivery.
I mean, why bother with actually physically going to Wal-Mart at 1 am, if you can just order your sack of dog food from Amazon at 1 am in your pajamas and it’ll show up a day or two later?
In any business, you can make good decisions if you consider all the problem and all the data, or bad decisions if you consider only half the problem and half the data.
Some business owners are good at the former. Others are much more adept at the latter. No way to say anything about any single individual decision at any single individual business other than by watching how well they do everything else.
I too have wondered similar things about stores such as Home Depot with automated re-stocking but also with what seems to me to be a very high tolerance for being out of something for a long time while still reserving shelf space for it. I can rarely go to HD seeking more than 5 things without finding an empty space where one of them belongs. This was true long before COVID.
Which suggests to me their algorithms are not correctly recognizing (intuiting?) the sale they did not make to me of that widget they did not have.
When I worked on automated inventory control / MRP software back in Ye Olde Darke Ages, re-ordering goods in anticipation of stock-out so as to prevent actual stock-out on any item was a big piece of the secret sauce. Almost 50 years later HD seems to never have learned that lesson.
Not to mention the potential customer who went elsewhere, knowing the likelihood of not finding what you are looking for.
In the airline industry there’s a natural inevitable tradeoff between percentage of seats sold, called “load factor”, and revenue per seat sold, called “yield”.
It’s easy to fill more seats by discounting the yield. Or overcharge on yield and crater your load factor. The game is to maximize total revenue (yield * load factor) across various price classes.
Those of us out in the field 
can only see load factor, not yield.
So a standing joke was that management would work hard developing a new route from A to B, then once they did get it performing routinely at 100% load factor, they’d cancel it as hopeless since their model showed the market was no longer growing. D’oh!! 
I do not know for certain that our management actually used that decision rubric, but it sure looked like it.
Bottom line:
Sorta like Home Dept can’t see the sales they did not make for lack of stock on the shelves, the airline could not see the seats they could have sold if only they’d put more out there to be sold.
What does this have to do with this thread and what point do you think you’re making?
[Moderating]
This is an inappropriate hijack for this thread. Take all further discussion of this point elsewhere.
to a good degree, covid gave businesses a carte blanche to do whatever they wanted…
in these trying times and out of abundance of caution for the safety of our clientes and workers we decide to …[stop packing your products at the checkout, rob you blind, fukk you sideways, etc…]
it just was a “do it now or never” moment … and a lot got done