Quoted message said:Bike shops are not the only businesses that often maintain banker’s hours.
I
have a high end kitchen and bath supply store very near my house with
hours of 9-6 M-F; They lose literally hundreds of thousands dollars in
sales a year to a competitor about 2 miles down the road, who is so busy
on Saturday that you have to sign in and wait upwards of an hour to be
served.
Quoted message said:I try to support local businesses whenever possible, but they often make
it very difficult to do so.
I feel your pain. There is a good reason why many (if not most) small
businesses have "banker's hours" though. It's just not practical for a small
business to have multiple shifts of employees, and the present rules
governing wages make a 10-hour 4-day workweek impractical. It wouldn't be a
problem if one end of the day was much busier than the other, but the truth
is that it gets very busy at opening (about 11am-11:30), and then busy again
from 5pm-6:45pm or so. If we were open later, we'd need to shift people to a
later start in the day, and if open earlier, vice versa. Either way we end
up understaffed for one of the busy times.
Also, one of the biggest challenges in any business is essentially people
management. How do you train them, make sure things are going right,
motivate, etc. As the number of employees increases, the amount of effort to
keep things going right seems to skyrocket. At some point a business is
large enough to have people who specialize in such things, but that's not
the case for the small business.
You can read all of this as a series of excuses and rationalizations, and
you'd be right. My take on it would be a bit different though- to me, it's a
recognition of my own limitations. I've had opportunities to "go big" and
passed them by, because I didn't feel I'd be able to maintain the levels of
quality that I want to see. Even the move from one store to two took quite a
bit of time to get things right, and there's no amount of money in the world
that would convince me to go past two. Clearly it's my own limitation; I
know of others who have handled it quite well.
--Mike Jacoubowsky
Chain Reaction Bicycles
www.ChainReaction.com
IMBA, BikesBelong, NBDA member
"Steven M. Scharf" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...
Quoted message said:Diablo Scott said:Mike Jacoubowsky said:(a great series of real bike shop factoids)
Forgive me, but *most* real bike shops are open on Sundays. I know I
should have checked the hours on your site but I was in the neighborhood
for the greyhound picnic and thought I'd stop in to browse and pick up a
jersey or something. Had to settle for looking at the cool stuff in the
window.Their Los Altos shop is open Sunday, been there many times on Sunday. I
agree with you regarding Sunday hours, but I’m sure that the shops base
their hours on studies of the cost of being open versus the quantity of
sales. There are several shops in the Mt. View, Palo Alto, Redwood City
area that are open Sunday, so it's not a big deal if you live in that
area.I always wondered about the bankers hours during the week that most bike
shops tend to keep. I drop a load of money at REI and Performance simply
because I can go to those places after work, reserving the weekends for
other pursuits. The four LBS's closest to me, don't have good weekday
hours; I wish that they'd stay open late at least one night a week. Bike
shops are not the only businesses that often maintain banker’s hours. I
have a high end kitchen and bath supply store very near my house with
hours of 9-6 M-F; They lose literally hundreds of thousands dollars in
sales a year to a competitor about 2 miles down the road, who is so busy
on Saturday that you have to sign in and wait upwards of an hour to be
served.I try to support local businesses whenever possible, but they often make
it very difficult to do so.