It’s 4pm on a Tuesday. You’ve done a total of $18 in sales today, and you’re working alone because you don’t have any employees or they’re all off work. You’d normally close at 9pm, but you decide that if you don’t break $100 before then, you’re going to close at 7pm.
It’s Halloween and you’d like to spend the evening with your family, so you close early.
You’re not feeling well on a Monday morning, so you post on Facebook that the store is opening at 2pm today instead of 10am.
Your employee calls in sick on the day you were going to go fishing with your friend. Rather than stand your buddy up, you close the store.
Your business has been doing poorly and you’re not sure week-to-week when you can get the store open.
There’s a video game coming out that you know everyone will want to play. You know that this will lead to a crappy sales day, so you just close that day.
You’re a fool, and I’ll tell you why.
Every time that a customer pulls on your door during your normal business hours and finds that it’s locked, you are not only losing whatever sale you were about to make that day. You also degrade the reputation and reliability of your business in the mind of that customer and their friends, forever. The next time they think about making a trip out to give you their money, they will wonder whether you are going to be there. Yes, I know that they could just call before they visit or check your Facebook page, but you know that they won’t, and in your heart you also know that they shouldn’t have to.
We are open seven days a week. We are open on Veteran’s Day, because it’s a school holiday and we’d be fools not to be available for that. We are open when a new World of Warcraft expansion hits, because our employees can play that night after work, and not all of our customers play WoW. We are open on snow days as long as the store has electricity, even if that means that I have to put my truck in 4WD and work the shift myself, alone. We are open when nobody appears to be buying, because there is always work to do and we don’t have perfect knowledge of who will come in.
If there’s some question in the minds of even a minority of our customers about whether we will be open, we will be open. We’re closed on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, but if we thought we would even do modest business on those days, we’d be open.
We are reliably open because we’re professionals and we don’t want our customers to worry about whether or not we’ll be there when they need us.
Be open.
Yes. This drives me bonkers as a customer, why would I ever inflict it on my own cuatomers? Also, be open when people are shopping AND when they aren’t. The not times are good for staff training, improvment work, research, etc. When I see a place open 4 hours a day, or starting at 5 pm I think “thats a hobby, they probably don’t have what I want anyway.”
If you can’t make a 7 day a week full time store function on the time you (and staff, hopefully) have available, you shouldn’t open a store.