How long has it been since you’ve considered your hours of operation to determine whether you are maximizing your opportunities with customers? Many store managers get entrenched in doing things the way they’ve always done things and, let’s face it, opening and closing the store is about as repetitive as anything one can think of as regards retail operations. Therefore, probably, hours of operation are rarely considered or modified once in place.

Taking an occasional look at hours does not necessarily mean that you will decide to change anything, but it does require you to focus on two very important elements: viewing your store through your customers’ eyes and profitability. I think almost everybody would agree that both of those considerations would be worthwhile examinations.

Determining your store’s slotting in the market place (see Discovery-Based Retail Chapter 9) can go a long way in helping you understand why your store’s hours of operation can and must be different from various types of competitors even within your sales category. Compare a locally owned lumberyard or home center’s hours of operation against that of a Lowe’s or Home Depot, for example, and you can readily see the differences.

More than likely when you conduct this review, if you change things at all, you won’t be adding hours per day or days per week, but rather, perhaps 30 minutes in the morning or 30 minutes or an hour in the evening. If your point of sale system offers time coding of transactions this process will be fairly straightforward. You can simply review sales during the first 30 minutes of the day and last 30 minutes of the day. If the register is ringing regularly during those periods, it might be worth considering “extending” them. If your registers do not offer this capability, then old-fashioned observation will be required.

There are a couple of other things to consider. If either of those two periods are slower than you would expect or slower than other periods of the day, it might lead you to conclude that the store’s bottom line might benefit from shortening hours slightly. This would have to be determined on a store-by-store level, but remember if your staff is operating at the level that they should be, there are beneficial tasks that are being accomplished during these periods too. Though the dollar value of those actions is difficult to quantify, it is certain that time is required for tasks beyond the actual sales process.

I constantly reinforce viewing your store through its customers’ eyes. In fact, perhaps some who have read my books, blogs or other articles might even say that I get carried away with this point. But it seems to me that there is nothing to manage in retail if sales do not first occur. Knowing that retail sales are directly proportional to how your store appeals to its customers just seems so fundamental in the managerial process. When you examine your store in this manner, hours of operation will definitely have to be a consideration.