Early-Closing Wednesdays

Prompted by the incursion of my daughter in my bedroom on Sunday morning, asking to go to Specsavers in order to get her glasses fixed, I started to ponder on the current generation of youth, and their knowledge of Business Hours.

Who can forget the days, back in the 70s, when, if you wanted to change your library book, you had to visit the library on a Saturday morning. Sure, the library was open during the week, but we'd all be at school, and while there probably was time to go straight after school, we never seemed to go - which left only the scant 3 hours between 0900 and 1200 on a Saturday morning. In addition to which, the library also subscribed to Early-Closing Wednesday.

I have to assume that Early-Closing Wednesday was a direct result of some businesses being open on Saturday morning. Because we work for 5 days, and rest for 2, and in those days many more businesses were run by individuals rather than the corporations currently doing the job. If a person owned their business, they'd work there, and maybe employ some help. But the model, then, was that the owner worked when the shop/business was open. And so the shops would be open for some form of 5/2 split. Maybe the shop would be open all day on Saturday (I don't remember many shops which closed at lunchtime), and then have a whole day during the week when they'd be unavailable.

And what, I hear you cry, became of the business should the owner wish to take holiday? Quite. The business would have a polite notice affixed to the door, detailing the intended holiday dates, and that the business would be closed for that period. Apologies.

But we have a generation of kids who know nothing of this. Why can't she take her glasses to Specsavers on a Sunday morning? The supermarkets are available on Sunday, as are many clothes shops. But a lot of "real" businesses, such as banks and strangely, libraries, still adhere, as best they can, to that old model from my own youth. Thus, while it's possible to do a small amount of high-street banking on a Saturday morning, most "proper" banks are unable to deal with anything more than a few deposits or withdrawals. You certainly can't set up a new bank account. It's no wonder that having bank accounts with building societies became so popular.

I do find it strange when businesses cling, resolutely, to old business models, despite an ever (and increasingly swiftly) changing demand from customers. Look at the Post Office - it was a few years INTO the current century before they started to accept plastic for payments. I cannot forget the embarrassment, standing at the window and being told that no, my £141 payment had to be cash or cheque, because they STILL didn't accept debit cards - and this was less than 13 years ago. I'm not sure they're up to credit cards yet, but the acceptance of any kind of plastic is a boon!

I don't really want to get started on the whole Music and Movie industry, and their heel-dragging reluctance to offer what the customers actually want - in a way, I sort of understand this, because they're SO damn big, and were able to get away with a LOT of crap for a very long time. I do, however, find it odd that a business as large as Specsavers (the Tesco of the glasses world, if you will) offers no Sunday opening at all.

Since I was a young adult, it's become the norm that ladies, whether married or not, would work. And thus our current work time model started - with the increase in both partners having to work, there were less stay-at-home mums to do the shopping at "normal" times during the week. Late-Night Thursday proved such a success with some businesses that this was extended to the rest of the week. In fact, Late-Night Thursday is probably one of the last days on which one actually wishes to shop, a point proved by the sparsity of shoppers on Thursday evenings in 2013. And while internet shopping may have a bit to do with this, the popularity of Saturday and Sunday daytime shopping, even now, might belie this assertion.

I've got to say that I'm sure the invention of Champagne Thursday was the MAIN reason that Late-Night Thursday has become so unpopular!

I realise I've not really arrived at a particular point - we all know that businesses are struggling against the ease of internet shopping - but I've forgotten how much things with which I grew up are NOT ingrained in my own children. Thus the insistence that they had to remind me about setting up their bank accounts DIRECTLY after school so we could make it to the ONLY bank who seems to do accounts with cards for teenagers, at a time when said bank was actually available to create the accounts. And my daughter's inevitable disappointment this past Sunday as I tried to explain that many businesses don't open on a Sunday!