I can tell you that this has almost completely “normalized” back to 2019 patterns.
There was already a trend away from 24 hour stores before the pandemic. See this article from just before the pandemic got going.
Hy-Vee ends 24-hour operations | Grocery Dive.
Since the easing of the pandemic and the worst of labor shortages, companies are looking at the cost of adding back 24 hour shopping and finding the payoff isn’t there.
As has been observed above, there has been a trend away from “24 hours” for a very long time that COVID merely accelerated, and, trivially, this is because companies believe it is not profitable. I’m not sure the actual mechanics of why it should be less profitable over time have been explored.
In the mid-90s in my rather average metro area (not New York, not farmland, not home to anything that would make it particularly unusual in terms of demand for overnight services compared to any other populated area of the U.S.), we had the following:
-Every Kinko’s location was open 24 hours. The base rationale was probably “we run an overnight shift anyway so that large orders can be completed at times when there is minimal interruption from foot traffic, we might as well let people come in the door and use the self-serve as long as employees are here.”
-The regional grocery store chain that was and still is our #1 grocer was open 24 hours. Similar logic as why Wal-Mart used to be 24 hours at most locations: Any reasonably busy grocery store has an overnight stocking shift, so if you have employees on-site and you’re paying for lights, HVAC, etc. anyway, why not make some sales.
-Every Waffle House and IHOP was 24 hours and there were multiple independent diners that were open round-the-clock as well.
-Stores that would never actually be open overnight like Office Depot had roving overnight logistics teams that would hit every store in the area (usually 2 stores for 4 hours each per night, doing 10 per week) doing merchandise resets and stocking, so that people working during the day could focus on customer service and sales.
-About a third of McDonalds locations were 24 hours, spaced out so there was always at least one on “your side of town.”
Now the only thing open 24 hours is Waffle House and chain convenience stores (Wawa, Sheetz, 7-11).
FedEx bought Kinko’s and needed to make a lot of adjustments to the digital world. It’s simply less volume to manage and they don’t need to bother with an overnight shift. Retailers like office supply stores underwent severe contractions in their business and are just waiting out the clock on 15-year leases before they go totally online, so they kiboshed the professional salespeople and just make the single set of employees do everything during the day. Fast food probably was mostly about the difficulty in keeping employees and the need to concentrate the people they could get on the most profitable hours.
As for the grocery stores, the best explanation may be that they just could no longer control the criminal incidents. The immense rise in shoplifting alone and the reluctance to prosecute it since 2020 means that leaving the doors open in the middle of the night is just too much of a risk. When you add in violent crime you have additional problems with reputational risk and liability for injured employees. Maybe overnight supermarkets will come back now that the pendulum has swung a bit on these issues. Fundamentally, a Wal-Mart or Kroger type place always will have the “we’re running a shift anyway, so why not…” carrot dangling in front of them. We’ll see.
You’re the pro here, so I’m not meaning to dispute your contentions. I’m just trying to ensure I understand what you meant.
What does “normalized back to 2019” mean in the context of both online shopping and live shopping? And whether that’s meant as agreement or disagreement with @bump’s comment you quote?
Pre-2019 retail 24-hour opening was quite common, but as you say it was already declining by 2019. So has it since bottomed out and now is rebounding? Or what?
Unrelated to the above …
I wonder how much of 24-hour opening hours for [whatever] as outlined by @songsoflovetrouble just above are a self-powered hamster wheel. The stores are open odd hours to support the workers who work odd hours. Once vast swathes of 24-hour stores closed overnight, vast swathes of workers got to sleep overnight instead. So they’re not out buying at add hours on their way to/from their odd-hours job.
Sure, folks like police and hospital staffers, (and some airline folks) still work 24-hour jobs with 24-hour lives. But the total headcount of all such workers may be far smaller than it was.
True. I wasn’t trying to say that it was 100% a pandemic-related shift in behavior, but that it’s just a shift in behavior, and that the pandemic probably exacerbated it to some degree.
Sorry, I should have quoted better.
I was referring to shopping patterns reflecting more remote work arrangements where people were shopping more during 9-5 than they previously did. That has almost all shifted back (which is what I meant by normalized)
24 hour was in secular decline, which accelerated during covid, and shows no sign of coming back.
It was 2013 that I first noticed grocery stores and fast food chains ceasing 24/7 operating hours. That’s also when 7-Eleven started carrying things like bacon, eggs, and one gallon jugs of milk.
As someone who used to do after midnight shopping because I work a later shift, I just adjusted and figured out how to go shopping either before work, after work (but before midnight when they close), or do my shopping on the weekend.
Also with curbside pickup and online shopping, that also makes it easier. I just order everything online for delivery to the door, or I place an online order and do a curbside pickup rather than having to pick everything out myself.
I miss shopping at 2am, but I figured out ways around it. I assume most other people did too, and businesses figured they could cut labor costs 6 hours a day.