Operating hours: pasting them on a door can create a sticky situation.

I know next to nothing about the food sold at Sunshine Spice Café and did not patronize it during my three-day stay in Boise earlier this year.  So it would be entirely unfair to carp on petty considerations like operating hours.  This brief post, therefore, isn’t a criticism; just an observation.  Operating hours often are one of the most difficult factors that a small business must define.  Quite obviously (yet still frequently overlooked), operating hours set the stage for the business’s engagement with its potential client base—the temporal parameters for transactions.  A poor calibration between when people want to purchase that business’s products and those open doors can result in considerable lost revenue.  So the business must recalibrate.  And a business that fails to shrewdly adjust to operating hours that are conducive to the majority of consumers will not easily succeed.

Everything I’ve stated thus far is more or less obvious: business owners should know the best time to be open.  That said, it’s equally imprudent for a business to shift hours constantly to meet the tastes of the public, however fickle it may be.  Over-frequent changes in operating hours will elicit confusion and (eventually) frustration, making the business seem haphazardly managed, even if it’s a tight ship if one gets to peek through the porthole.  It’s no doubt tricky for a bricks-and-mortar business, which defines its transactions by permitting customers to step into its space (in contrast with an online-centered business) to balance good calibration of operating hours with maintaining an air of consistency and order.  Sunshine Spice Café and Bakery in Boise proves this challenge before one even steps through the doorway.

It takes no more than a minute to deduce what the owners had to do: the business initially remained closed only on Mondays, but they opted to include Tuesdays as well, thereby switching the weekday operating hours to Wednesday through Friday.  The decision most likely happened recently, and they didn’t yet have time to adjust the decals on the glass doorway, or it was a trial run to see if these operating hours were the ones that would “stick”.  And, only when Sunshine Spice Café and Bakery determines the goldilocks zone for operating hours, then the owners might they scratch off the old dates/times and replace them with the new ones.

I wrote many, many years ago about how business operating hours can hint at the economic health both of the business itself and the neighborhood or trade area in which it resides.  And, if a place has to scale back its hours of operation, that’s often an indicator that not all is well, as I noted with the near-complete elimination of 24-hour pharmacy service among Walgreens and CVS, the two primary surviving nationwide drug store chains.  But is that really the case with a small business like Sunshine Spice Café?  Most hospitality trade associations will assert that either Monday or Tuesday are the slowest for the restaurant business, with highly particular, localized factors determining which of these two days ultimately wins…or loses.  And, since one is only slightly worse than the other, it’s no surprise that a novelty like Sunshine Spice should opt out of both.

And yes, Sunshine Spice is indeed a novelty: an Afghan coffee shop and bakery that serves some lunch items, all of which come from a variety of nationalities and cultures, Afghanistan among them.  This downtown Boise location is the second; the original is on the near west side of town.  It’s unfair to Boise to assert that Afghan cuisine is too foreign or exotic, because it would be a risky venture in most larger cities too.  (Even metro Washington DC, with a sizable Afghan community, has few—if any—establishments that market themselves as an Afghanistan-and-beyond bakery.)  Yet Sunshine Spice has persevered enough to open this new downtown location, where real estate values are climbing sharply in tandem with Idaho’s population.

To avoid singling out Sunshine Spice Café, here’s a comparable example in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia:

This newish location within the subtle Benny’s chain—all pizzerias are “Benny” paired with a different Italian last name—has also decided to post new hours after the decals pasted onto the doorway glass.  Benny DiForza’s apparently determined that the night-owls in Del Ray are fewer than initially expected, cutting back on late hours that were more common across numerous businesses than they are today.  (I encourage readers to scan the unusual array of graphics in the lower half of the door more thoroughly; interesting stuff.)  The hours have been partially adjusted on the website as of the time of this post, but not fully: apparently the management at Benny DiForza’s shaved off the first 30 minutes in the morning, opening at 11:30 instead of 11:00am as the website still indicates.

Returning to the smaller of these two businesses, the sisters that founded Sunshine Spice are doing exactly what they should to calibrate their operating hours.  By all means, if staying open on both Monday and Tuesday reaps no benefits,  then the transaction cost is simply better harnessed to live life outside of the workplace.  The website fully captures the changes; no surprise, since website text is easy to modify.  If this shift proves a wise long-term decision, the four sisters can always scrape the decals off the glass and place more attractive, permanent operating hours.  They even smartly thought ahead, listing Saturday and Sunday separately, even though currently they continue to remain in business from 9:00am to 4:00pm.  That may change someday—customer habits tend to be very different on weekends than on weekdays—and they’ve already dedicated space and text to distinguish those days.  Maybe a bakery should open and close after lunch?  Most seem to benefit from opening their doors to the early breakfast crowd.  Regardless of the decision, Sunshine Spice Café has, through paper and pen, shown one of the easily overlooked challenges of running a small business.  May they dish out many more servings of nan-i-Afghan to Boise’s tens of thousands of newcomers.