Just a random thought, but does anyone know why so many companies (especially retail ones) run to business hours where the majority of their customers are unavailable due to themselves being at work, and also close on bank holidays when their customers are most likely to be available?
I’d like to see the results of cutting back working hours to say 5, opening from 6 - 11pm.
Ok. The end. Carry on.
because people like to work 9-5, even shop workers ?
Also, why does the NHS run Monday to Friday 9 to 5 with full front and secondary line staff. I’m talking about the people who actual are involved with patient and relatives care, not pen pushers. But from 5 to 9 and the weekends you get just a basic cover service and so many staff essential for the 9 to 5 work just disappears home.
What is it? Do people magically get immune from illness atthese hours?
I don’t know, maybe the police and fire service have this exact same problem where staff who actually help them do the job they do disappear too?
And who the fek cares if there are 24 hour telesales operators?
Retail stores can be bound by laws, yes. Sunday trading laws being the obvious one. If you’re shop is of a certain size you can’t trade longer than 6 hours (apart from the Olympics, which will be extended to 8 hours) which is why small corner shops or some Tesco Express trade longer, as they have smaller floor space.
We have delivery restrictions which means it would be silly for us to open earlier than 8am, as we’d have no fresh stock! Also, we are only allowed to be open certain hours and have to pass changes through local council. Having said that, we’re talking late night stuff, not shops that close at 5pm.
What amazes me, I got a contract phone from CPW yesterday, called Three customer service last night and they wont be open until Monday the 4th because of the Bank Holidays?!?!? What?!?!
Same with deliveries “we can deliver between 9 and 5pm (but not at a specific time) mon-fri” - that’s great, but I won’t be there because i need to go to work to earn money to buy the stuff in the first place. Surely there’s a gap in the market for a delivery company that can deliver when people are actually at home.
We got a load of notes through the letterbox last week from a guy who’d come to read the electric/gas meters - he came in the middle of the day on week days, found we weren’t in and did the same again a day later. Then we got a letter from them saying they’d tried 3 times but had been unable to read the meters - like I was just hiding behind the sofa to avoid them - I work all day, like most people, that can’t be a complete surprise to you.
Yes there are laws and there are some reasons for why this happens.
Firstly, there is “some” foot traffic through-out the day, which shops would not want to miss out on, so you would have to be open from 9am anyway, the problems with opening til say 9pm are as follows.
Working Time Regulations, you can’t force anyone to work more than 48 hours a week. It is optional. 48 Hours a week on an 8 hour day is 6 days, regular shop opening hours. So if you can’t find people willing to sign up for more than 48 hours a week, the only other option is to have an extra member of staff, which you wouldn’t need in a 9-5 opening hours shift pattern. That has a lot of extra costs beyond merely paying the wages of that extra member of staff. The other thing is that working more than 48 hours a week will undoubtedly run you into overtime pay, which may well result in any benefits being wiped away by having to pay staff extra.
I think the other issue is that we are all used to 9-5 shopping, other than things like Tesco, which are open 24 hours, people are used to shopping within that time-frame and don’t think to shop outside that time-frame. I bought some stuff from a shop recently where I had to pick stuff up at a later date, told me they were open to til 9pm, did I bother going after 6? Nope, never crossed my mind to do so, I went back in my lunch break.
While we continue to shop in the way we do, the wages and costs involved in remaining open later will not be recouped,
I take it they want to work the same hours as you
