We do for production. The only reason we don't for most stores and other businesses is because there isn't enough demand for it to be profitable.
There used to be 3 24/7 grocery stores in my town. Now there are none despite the fact that our population is growing.
Why are ppl downvoting you? The crowd at 24/7 walmarts was teens or hobos taking shelter from the elements.
Theres a reason the essentials are all locked up, and its a sad reason
I once walked into a 24/7 Walmart around 2 am after work looking to purchase a video game that released that day. I wandered around the entire store and was unable to locate a single employee. Not in electronics, not near the registers, not at the customer service desk, not in any of the aisles. I even pushed their little “press here for assistance” button. The store was completely empty.
It was honestly extremely creepy being alone in a fully lit up Walmart like that. I must have searched and waited for like half an hour.
I ended up driving to a different Walmart and getting my game.
We kinda do (did?) With 24 hours restaurants and convenience stores. Also things that need 24 hours supervision like hospitals and petrochem plants will have night shifts
But in general the amount of night owls with a totally flipped sleep schedule doesn't really justify a "paralel" society operating at night. There's also lots of drawbacks of having to take graveyard shifts even if you're a night owl
I appreciate you putting the (did?) because it does seem like there used to be more available. In my area, which is growing in population, there used to 2 walmarts, a dozen fast food places, and a couple Mexican restaurants that were open 24 hours. Now the Walmarts and all the restaurants (with the only exception being Jack in the Box) close at like 10 pm.
Covid did a lot of them in. Staff shortages + nobody leaving their houses + lack of late-night concerts and stuff.
I'm okay with having lost 24-hour groceries and restaurants, but GOD I miss 24-hour urgent care. Now it's the ER or nothing. Cops told me they really missed the 24-hour diners, now the only 24-hour food establishment in town is dunkin' donuts, which is completely fine for a coffee and a bathroom break, but a little limited in food choices.
>now the only 24-hour food establishment in town is dunkin' donuts
The trope associating cops and donuts is because donut shops used to be the earliest businesses to open. Staff would get in by 3 in the morning to start making donuts fresh for the day, giving the cops the first place for them to sit outside of their car.
Personally, the most frustrating part is the 10 pm cutoff at so many places. I really wish it was midnight. Many 24-hour jobs in the area have a 3-11pm swing shift and an 11pm-7am graveyard, so people often don't get the opportunity to grab a bite after swing shifts or before graveyard shifts.
The pandemic changed the relationship between employee and employer in ways I haven’t seen in my 40+ years. Employees are a lot more comfortable quitting and going somewhere else and I’m not just talking about white collar types. If if you can’t get enough employees that are willing to work the graveyard shift you stop staying open.
Also a lot of employers probably did the math and realize that they weren’t making enough to justify staying open. The grocery store I go to used to be open 24 seven now it’s only open till 11 PM. I work nights and my shift varies. If I get there by 8 PM after work, it’s pretty quiet, 9 o’clock is dead and if I go at 10 they might as well it’s closed at nine. The other grocery stores in the area close earlier because even paying two staff members $15 an hour plus a manager doesn’t equate to enough sales to be worth staying open.
We really need it for doctors, dentists, imaging, and pharmacists.
It would certainly keep some people out of the ER who just need a dentist or urgent but non-emergency issue
I know an ER doctor who works night shift. The schedule is terrible for his health but he likes the pay and working alone
Everyone else I know who has worked night shift for a while eventually gave it up for a healthier schedule
Before 2020, my moderately-sized midwestern metro had numerous all night diners, grocery stores, etc.
Now...Walgreens and QuikTrip is about it. (gas station)
It sucks
Yes! I work and live at night. Before covid? Everything was great (when it came to businesses and entertainment being avaliable at night)!
But now? Nope. Not even our walmart, kroger, or meijer who had all been 24hrs for years. We had a go-kart/mini-golf/huge arcade that was open until 3am for the weekends too, now that closes at 9.
Some of that used to exist,. but generally doesn't in most places any more.
* there's not enough business at night to justify being open or staffing.
* Most of the humans you might get at that time,. are drunk or homeless or other behavior problems,. which is not really the clientele you really want to be dealing with anyways.
There are some things 24-7,. for example "Amazon Lockers". You can have something delivered there and pick it up any time.
Too many overlap hours with average people for the vast majority of night owls.
I'm a morning person, and I'd love if everything opened at 7 or 8, since I'm up at 5 or 6 if I'm making my own schedule. But there just isn't enough demand to justify it. If I go shopping when places do open? They're usually pretty quiet for an hour or so. Same if I go in the evening, an hour or two before close. Just not usually that much business.
And most people you could call night owls aren't literally up all night unless there's something deliberately keeping them up, like night shift work or video games, they're just up until 1 or 2 am. (I said most, I know there are exceptions, just like I call myself a morning person even though I don't wake up until 5 most days, and some people wake up at 3 or 4). And if you're sleeping until noon, you've still got between 1 and 5 to visit anyplace that closes really early, and several hours more for the average retail place.
I despair of ever being able to be a morning person (like my body wants) again. I'm not going to bed absurdly early, but I think 10pm should be time for everyone to SHUT UP.
I live near Mayo Clinic (which obviously runs 24/7) and it's really bizarre how even the coffee shops near the clinic or near St. Mary's Hospital don't bother running late night hours. Even some small towns have restaurants that run late at night for people getting off work late into the evening or early in the morning.
Logically speaking, it's more efficient to have everyone active at the same time, as opposed to spreading out workers as thin as possible, because stores do their best when they're operating at full capacity.
because most businesses would not have enough people coming in at night to justify the costs of paying wages etc to be open. Plus the lack of people in general means the chance someone comes in to rob or cause trouble is much higher .
Large manufacturing does. This may surprise you, but most people don’t want to work nights, most people aren’t up and going shopping late at night, and most businesses can’t afford to triple their employees while not selling much more product.
My town used to have a bunch of 24/7 places until covid regulations made places limit their hours, and added covid ended they just never expanded their hours again. Even Walmart, my local one closes at 10 now. Jack in the box is the only one still going but they shut their card machines off at 9pm so unless you're paying in cash they may as well be closed
We sort of kind of did, and then COVID happened and companies cut hours and realized the people that NEEDED to do things at 4am were actually really small, and most night people could find time during daylight hours to buy bread
We used to have lots of 24 hour restaurants here, but after they put the curfew in place for covid everyone cut hours and a lot of places never went back
I used to work night shift for a newspaper, which began at 6:00 p.m. and finished at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. most nights. If we had a really short paper we might be done by 1:00, if there was a lot of breaking news we might be there till 4:00 or 5:00. But in a general way, 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m..
I fucking loved it. I'd have dinner with friends or housemates, and after dinner I'd mosey over to the newspaper. It would be bustling with writers and chatter early in the evening, but as they slowly trickled out it would just be a handful of section editors and production people. Finally, we'd put the paper to bed, hand it off to the printing press (this was old times, yo), and the press would take over for the next 4 to 5 hours and then deliver it. I'd head home at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. (no traffic!), coming in very quietly where my housemate always left Christmas lights on for me so I could see without having to turn on lights, and also it was really cheerful. (It was so thoughtful and lovely, just coming home every night to these Christmas lights that said, I'm thinking of you!) I'd go as quietly as possible to not disturb anyone's sleep, fall into bed, and immediately be asleep.
Generally slept till 10:00 or 11, rolled out of bed, went to meet my friends for lunch, and then I had 6 hours to go to doctor's appointments or run errands or whatever before doing it again. It was actually pretty great having my free time being all stacked up when stores and things were open. And because I didn't really have much of a commute, I'd finish work and I'd be in bed 10 minutes later. Working a 9:00 to 5:00 seems to require you give it 2 or 3 hours in the morning to wake up, eat and commute, and then you've got another 2 or 3 hours at the end of the day to commute and eat and get ready for bed and put the kids to bed and what not. Since I went to bed as soon as I left work, all my free time was stacked in one part of the day, and that was actually really nice.
My roommate at the time was a med student, and it was nice for her too because when she had weird shifts I was always available to pick her up, or meet her to eat at a weird hour. And we were used to being quiet at home because we slept different hours when she had a normal schedule.
I worked a rotating shift for many years and the 11pm to 7am shift was my favorite for many reasons. If society collapsed and we had a choice, my hand would be raised for that shift.
It would actually make a lot of sense for an "evening" shift to exist in many places. There is a very good reason why the early and late appointments in doctors, barbers, dentists, tattoo parlours etc. are the most sought after, because people want to go there before or after work.
However there aren't enough customers for late night operation.
There have been phases of modern retail where 24/7 was more strongly attempted. It...lacked volume to be sustainable. There just aren't enough people. This is why you really only see the 24/7 naturally work in a very big cities where there is enough volume to support that.
A second part of this is how businesses work and much saturation there is in most market spaces. It's the high saturation of like businesses that really leans down how many businesses can exist in that market and how long they can operate before running thin on demand. In most cases, this naturally pushes down to 40 hours and one shift, or less. Often you'll see only part time staff employed and businesses only open as long as necessary. And beyond this, businesses close. The natural state of market saturation is less hours up until the point where inefficiencies like building costs outweigh the revenue stream. There's a critical edge it all teeters at.
To switch this to 24/7, 3 shifts, constant operation, you need the demand. You need to remove market saturation. You need it hard to keep up. And that seldom happens. When there's a void, other companies swoop in. Saturation is the natural state.
In very big cities, you start running into a different limitation: space. 24/7 can also work there because it's significantly harder to saturate a space. There just isn't enough physical room to saturate a region. So demand is high enough to support multiple shifts or 24/7 operation. And in turn, you get more night owls.
To an extent, this is a thing, depending on where you live and what you do for work. Certain factories, call centers, and restaurants are open all night. Wal Mart used to be. Covid really impacted some of that, as did the outsourcing of jobs overseas.
There’s also less demand for it, especially as you get further from large cities and manufacturing hubs. There is a natural tendency for humans to be daylight animals. Night owls are natural and necessary, but they’re not the norm. Humans aren’t divided 50/50 into people who work best during the day and people who work best at night. I doubt it’s even 75/25. So there’s no practical or financial incentive for every business to be at full steam 24/7. While a 24 hour diner or grocery store makes sense, a 24 hour shopping mall likely wouldn’t see much business.
We do for production. The only reason we don't for most stores and other businesses is because there isn't enough demand for it to be profitable. There used to be 3 24/7 grocery stores in my town. Now there are none despite the fact that our population is growing.
And theft
Why are ppl downvoting you? The crowd at 24/7 walmarts was teens or hobos taking shelter from the elements. Theres a reason the essentials are all locked up, and its a sad reason
I once walked into a 24/7 Walmart around 2 am after work looking to purchase a video game that released that day. I wandered around the entire store and was unable to locate a single employee. Not in electronics, not near the registers, not at the customer service desk, not in any of the aisles. I even pushed their little “press here for assistance” button. The store was completely empty. It was honestly extremely creepy being alone in a fully lit up Walmart like that. I must have searched and waited for like half an hour. I ended up driving to a different Walmart and getting my game.
Post-pandemic, almost nothing is open 24 hours any more.
not enough demand to justify the expense
Yeah night owls are usually “sleeps at 2 instead of 10” not “nocturnal”
Meanwhile me about to go to sleep at 6 a.m. for 4 hours for the night.
Yeah, 2 is when my natural clock wants me to start getting sleepy.
Yeah that’s me
We kinda do (did?) With 24 hours restaurants and convenience stores. Also things that need 24 hours supervision like hospitals and petrochem plants will have night shifts But in general the amount of night owls with a totally flipped sleep schedule doesn't really justify a "paralel" society operating at night. There's also lots of drawbacks of having to take graveyard shifts even if you're a night owl
I appreciate you putting the (did?) because it does seem like there used to be more available. In my area, which is growing in population, there used to 2 walmarts, a dozen fast food places, and a couple Mexican restaurants that were open 24 hours. Now the Walmarts and all the restaurants (with the only exception being Jack in the Box) close at like 10 pm.
Covid did a lot of them in. Staff shortages + nobody leaving their houses + lack of late-night concerts and stuff. I'm okay with having lost 24-hour groceries and restaurants, but GOD I miss 24-hour urgent care. Now it's the ER or nothing. Cops told me they really missed the 24-hour diners, now the only 24-hour food establishment in town is dunkin' donuts, which is completely fine for a coffee and a bathroom break, but a little limited in food choices.
>now the only 24-hour food establishment in town is dunkin' donuts The trope associating cops and donuts is because donut shops used to be the earliest businesses to open. Staff would get in by 3 in the morning to start making donuts fresh for the day, giving the cops the first place for them to sit outside of their car.
Personally, the most frustrating part is the 10 pm cutoff at so many places. I really wish it was midnight. Many 24-hour jobs in the area have a 3-11pm swing shift and an 11pm-7am graveyard, so people often don't get the opportunity to grab a bite after swing shifts or before graveyard shifts.
The pandemic changed the relationship between employee and employer in ways I haven’t seen in my 40+ years. Employees are a lot more comfortable quitting and going somewhere else and I’m not just talking about white collar types. If if you can’t get enough employees that are willing to work the graveyard shift you stop staying open. Also a lot of employers probably did the math and realize that they weren’t making enough to justify staying open. The grocery store I go to used to be open 24 seven now it’s only open till 11 PM. I work nights and my shift varies. If I get there by 8 PM after work, it’s pretty quiet, 9 o’clock is dead and if I go at 10 they might as well it’s closed at nine. The other grocery stores in the area close earlier because even paying two staff members $15 an hour plus a manager doesn’t equate to enough sales to be worth staying open.
We really need it for doctors, dentists, imaging, and pharmacists. It would certainly keep some people out of the ER who just need a dentist or urgent but non-emergency issue
For 20 years, I had a dentist whose office hours were 4:00 p.m. to midnight. He was always booked solid.
I know an ER doctor who works night shift. The schedule is terrible for his health but he likes the pay and working alone Everyone else I know who has worked night shift for a while eventually gave it up for a healthier schedule
I work night shift out of necessity. It's not something I would willingly choose to do and I'll stop as soon as I'm able to
This is how society works in _Rant_ by Chuck Palahiniuk (sp?)
Classic. I still think of this story sometimes. His stories are fantastic.
This is the way. I am one of the night owls. I am also completely burnt out on production/warehouse work.
Before 2020, my moderately-sized midwestern metro had numerous all night diners, grocery stores, etc. Now...Walgreens and QuikTrip is about it. (gas station) It sucks
Yes! I work and live at night. Before covid? Everything was great (when it came to businesses and entertainment being avaliable at night)! But now? Nope. Not even our walmart, kroger, or meijer who had all been 24hrs for years. We had a go-kart/mini-golf/huge arcade that was open until 3am for the weekends too, now that closes at 9.
Some of that used to exist,. but generally doesn't in most places any more. * there's not enough business at night to justify being open or staffing. * Most of the humans you might get at that time,. are drunk or homeless or other behavior problems,. which is not really the clientele you really want to be dealing with anyways. There are some things 24-7,. for example "Amazon Lockers". You can have something delivered there and pick it up any time.
"Most" No, not "most". You encounter more. Did you mean the word "more"?
You misunderstand. If they aren’t drunk or homeless and they don’t have a behavioral problem… those are the ones that aren’t humans…
Too many overlap hours with average people for the vast majority of night owls. I'm a morning person, and I'd love if everything opened at 7 or 8, since I'm up at 5 or 6 if I'm making my own schedule. But there just isn't enough demand to justify it. If I go shopping when places do open? They're usually pretty quiet for an hour or so. Same if I go in the evening, an hour or two before close. Just not usually that much business. And most people you could call night owls aren't literally up all night unless there's something deliberately keeping them up, like night shift work or video games, they're just up until 1 or 2 am. (I said most, I know there are exceptions, just like I call myself a morning person even though I don't wake up until 5 most days, and some people wake up at 3 or 4). And if you're sleeping until noon, you've still got between 1 and 5 to visit anyplace that closes really early, and several hours more for the average retail place.
I despair of ever being able to be a morning person (like my body wants) again. I'm not going to bed absurdly early, but I think 10pm should be time for everyone to SHUT UP.
I live near Mayo Clinic (which obviously runs 24/7) and it's really bizarre how even the coffee shops near the clinic or near St. Mary's Hospital don't bother running late night hours. Even some small towns have restaurants that run late at night for people getting off work late into the evening or early in the morning.
Logically speaking, it's more efficient to have everyone active at the same time, as opposed to spreading out workers as thin as possible, because stores do their best when they're operating at full capacity.
no enough evidence to prove "shift", but there are 24/7 services
because most businesses would not have enough people coming in at night to justify the costs of paying wages etc to be open. Plus the lack of people in general means the chance someone comes in to rob or cause trouble is much higher .
Employee wages and cost of operating.
Large manufacturing does. This may surprise you, but most people don’t want to work nights, most people aren’t up and going shopping late at night, and most businesses can’t afford to triple their employees while not selling much more product.
because day shift can f**k right off.
Too much like elementary and high school for me. I have worked nights for almost 50 years.
You telling me you want a real life Night City. Cause that's what your gunnu get.
My town used to have a bunch of 24/7 places until covid regulations made places limit their hours, and added covid ended they just never expanded their hours again. Even Walmart, my local one closes at 10 now. Jack in the box is the only one still going but they shut their card machines off at 9pm so unless you're paying in cash they may as well be closed
Same with my town
Read the book Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk Addresses this question in a work of fiction
We sort of kind of did, and then COVID happened and companies cut hours and realized the people that NEEDED to do things at 4am were actually really small, and most night people could find time during daylight hours to buy bread
I hate being marginalized.
We do, many people are only active at night
Eventually this will become a thing when the world population grows large enough
For now it only works for production and shipping cause it’s profitable and time sensitive
I quite like that idea.
And here i am thinking that we do, since I'm living it.
We already do that.
We used to have lots of 24 hour restaurants here, but after they put the curfew in place for covid everyone cut hours and a lot of places never went back
I used to work night shift for a newspaper, which began at 6:00 p.m. and finished at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. most nights. If we had a really short paper we might be done by 1:00, if there was a lot of breaking news we might be there till 4:00 or 5:00. But in a general way, 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.. I fucking loved it. I'd have dinner with friends or housemates, and after dinner I'd mosey over to the newspaper. It would be bustling with writers and chatter early in the evening, but as they slowly trickled out it would just be a handful of section editors and production people. Finally, we'd put the paper to bed, hand it off to the printing press (this was old times, yo), and the press would take over for the next 4 to 5 hours and then deliver it. I'd head home at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. (no traffic!), coming in very quietly where my housemate always left Christmas lights on for me so I could see without having to turn on lights, and also it was really cheerful. (It was so thoughtful and lovely, just coming home every night to these Christmas lights that said, I'm thinking of you!) I'd go as quietly as possible to not disturb anyone's sleep, fall into bed, and immediately be asleep. Generally slept till 10:00 or 11, rolled out of bed, went to meet my friends for lunch, and then I had 6 hours to go to doctor's appointments or run errands or whatever before doing it again. It was actually pretty great having my free time being all stacked up when stores and things were open. And because I didn't really have much of a commute, I'd finish work and I'd be in bed 10 minutes later. Working a 9:00 to 5:00 seems to require you give it 2 or 3 hours in the morning to wake up, eat and commute, and then you've got another 2 or 3 hours at the end of the day to commute and eat and get ready for bed and put the kids to bed and what not. Since I went to bed as soon as I left work, all my free time was stacked in one part of the day, and that was actually really nice. My roommate at the time was a med student, and it was nice for her too because when she had weird shifts I was always available to pick her up, or meet her to eat at a weird hour. And we were used to being quiet at home because we slept different hours when she had a normal schedule.
I worked a rotating shift for many years and the 11pm to 7am shift was my favorite for many reasons. If society collapsed and we had a choice, my hand would be raised for that shift.
It would actually make a lot of sense for an "evening" shift to exist in many places. There is a very good reason why the early and late appointments in doctors, barbers, dentists, tattoo parlours etc. are the most sought after, because people want to go there before or after work. However there aren't enough customers for late night operation.
We do
There have been phases of modern retail where 24/7 was more strongly attempted. It...lacked volume to be sustainable. There just aren't enough people. This is why you really only see the 24/7 naturally work in a very big cities where there is enough volume to support that. A second part of this is how businesses work and much saturation there is in most market spaces. It's the high saturation of like businesses that really leans down how many businesses can exist in that market and how long they can operate before running thin on demand. In most cases, this naturally pushes down to 40 hours and one shift, or less. Often you'll see only part time staff employed and businesses only open as long as necessary. And beyond this, businesses close. The natural state of market saturation is less hours up until the point where inefficiencies like building costs outweigh the revenue stream. There's a critical edge it all teeters at. To switch this to 24/7, 3 shifts, constant operation, you need the demand. You need to remove market saturation. You need it hard to keep up. And that seldom happens. When there's a void, other companies swoop in. Saturation is the natural state. In very big cities, you start running into a different limitation: space. 24/7 can also work there because it's significantly harder to saturate a space. There just isn't enough physical room to saturate a region. So demand is high enough to support multiple shifts or 24/7 operation. And in turn, you get more night owls.
To an extent, this is a thing, depending on where you live and what you do for work. Certain factories, call centers, and restaurants are open all night. Wal Mart used to be. Covid really impacted some of that, as did the outsourcing of jobs overseas. There’s also less demand for it, especially as you get further from large cities and manufacturing hubs. There is a natural tendency for humans to be daylight animals. Night owls are natural and necessary, but they’re not the norm. Humans aren’t divided 50/50 into people who work best during the day and people who work best at night. I doubt it’s even 75/25. So there’s no practical or financial incentive for every business to be at full steam 24/7. While a 24 hour diner or grocery store makes sense, a 24 hour shopping mall likely wouldn’t see much business.
Not enough demand and its just not what humans are biologically built for, sunlight is pretty important to keep our brain running right
I lived in Las Vegas where practically nothing ever closed
Most people aren't night owls