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Comment by fred92 | Hacker News Reader

The unfair thing about retail and service industry establishments not being closed on sundays while white collar office jobs are, is that schools are only open during the week, thus retail and service industry workers don't get tax-payer funded child-care on those days, kids of blue collar workers don't get to hang with their parents on the weekend furthening inequality inherent in our society. Obviously noone is per se forced to work on the weekend but in practice at every retail and service industry job I have worked at throughout my life there was immense pressure to work at least one weekend day i.e you won't even get these jobs if you aren't willing to work on weekends.

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In the US, Chick-fil-A is a fast food chain that closes 100% of their locations on Sundays. And I think that's wonderful for exactly the reasons you're describing.

Adorama and B&H, photography stores in NYC owned (IIRC) by Hasidic Jews, are closed on Saturdays. IIRC, they don't even take online orders.

> they don't even take online orders

edit: nope i was wrong, sry

t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶d̶o̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶c̶e̶s̶s̶e̶d̶/̶s̶h̶i̶p̶p̶e̶d̶/̶r̶d̶y̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶p̶i̶c̶k̶u̶p̶ ̶u̶n̶t̶i̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶i̶r̶ ̶n̶e̶x̶t̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶d̶a̶y̶

imo this is fine, i mostly use them for business purchases, which i usually dont need over the weekend (its fun to go to their store on lazy sundays though...)

> thought they do

Perhaps. Hadn't check recently.

You are right, at least wrt B&H. No orders accepted.

I live in the bible belt and visit the north frequently to visit family and I sometimes get a kick out of how most of the things I expect to be closed on Sundays where I live are closed on Saturdays. It's fun to experience.

You also get signs like "Will be Closed for Yom Kippur" like you see signs for "Closed for Easter" etc.

I've learned so much about Jewish holidays trying to shop at B&H. They do at least provide a calendar for convenience.

It's estimated that Chick-fil-A loses billions of dollars every year because of this.

Oh no…. what ever shall corporate do…

Money isn’t life.

Don't get me wrong - I fully admire their stance.

While I'm not religious, it is admirable to me when someone takes a stance on something they believe in at a cost to their own personal pocket book.

I think this would be very hard to estimate because it would be hard to tell how many workers work their specifically because of this policy. There are also some customers who shop their specifically because they appreciate the fact that they are closed on Sundays.

Business Insider has a guess: https://www.businessinsider.com/chick-fil-a-closes-on-sunday... - and this is a few years old. I'm sure it's probably higher now.

I would bet that a significant amount of the business they "lose" on Sundays just translates into pent-up demand that equalizes during the week. But super hard to measure/prove that sort of thing.

With increasing rents on retail space, how sustainable is that policy? Could the difference between customer flow 7 days a week and 6 days a week make or break a location?

Chik fil a runs extremely high volume so I imagine this isn’t a problem for them.

They are testing a concept restaurant that has four drive through lanes and the kitchen on the second level. https://www.wfla.com/news/national/chick-fil-a-restaurant-to...

The Chick-Fil-A locations I remember from two decades ago or more were in shopping malls where there was definitely lots of dead time during the week, and therefore one would think they would need to be open on Sundays to make up for it. So, I’m surprised by the high-volume concept you link to (though WFLA’s anti-GDPR policy prevents me from viewing it), though I have of course heard that shopping malls are less prominent a feature of the American retail landscape these days.

I’ve personally never seen one in a mall but I’m also not in the South.

The ones where I am are double lane drive through where the lines snake around and there are people roving the lanes to take drive through orders before they even reach the window.

I've seen similar drive-through-only places (though not 4-lane) off the freeway; I think in the Chicago area.

I feel their differentiator is quality employees(at least in my area). Having that unique quality could help attract better employees.

The majority of Chick-fil-A's are not renting their space. Most Chick-fil-A locations are built new on free-standing property physically owned outright by corporate headquarters and franchised to Owner-Operators with a revenue sharing model.

The "Business Model" section of their Wikipedia page has more info on this if you're curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A

(BTW, it also says they gross an average of $4.8 million per year per location, in 2016 at least. That's the highest sales of any Fast Food franchise in the US, vs the next in line, Whataburger, at only $2.7M per location per year. So being closed on Sunday doesn't seem like a big issue for them.)

There's a lot of reasons I don't like Chick-fil-A, but I did work for them briefly precisely because they are closed on Sundays, which is so rare. I was freelancing at the time and had hit a bad dry spell with no work coming in, so I sent out some applications for whatever jobs were around, food and retail stuff. None of them would budge on not working on Sundays because the weekends are their busiest hours, and I wouldn't agree to work on Sundays for religious reasons.

Chick-fil-a was the single worst job I've ever had, but at least I didn't work on Sundays.

Chic-fil-A is controversial because of it's political contributions and stated political preferences, but as far as I'm aware it has some of the better working conditions out there.

I worked for Chick-fil-A as a teenager for three years before I went to college. In that time span, I worked at two different stores for three different owners.

I had some run-of-the-mill frustrations at the time, but looking back on it I realize that I was always treated fairly and with as much flexibility, consideration, and respect as an otherwise completely unskilled teen just interested in saving up for an Xbox could ask for. There was zero abuse, zero exploitative pressure, zero sketchy behind the scenes stuff to cut cost or whatever.

I've never worked fast food other than Chick-fil-A so I can't really compare what the average conditions are like at any other fast food McJob, but my experience at Chick-fil-A was pretty much across the board positive and I think it set me up to have the right kind of expectations of myself and of the kind of employer I want to work for ever since.

I've noticed that a ton of locally-owned restaurants in my area are open on Saturday-Sunday and closed on Mondays. Owners (who often work insane hours, living at the restaurant from open to close) prefer to be open on high-value weekend days and take a less profitable weekday off.

Right, it's clear why owners would want this and how they benefit. They were talking about its effects on workers however.

Monday restaurant closings used to be a lot more common at least in some big cities. (Probably aligned with a lot of theatres being dark that night as well.)

Sunday is industry night and Monday is your day off if you work food service.

This seemed to get a ton worse in the ‘00s. A lot more stuff used to be closed on Sundays, have no holiday hours, and close earlier.

I'm sure the change happened at different times in different places. But in the the late 70s, even in a big city like Boston/Cambridge, almost nothing was open on Sunday. If you played sports or had other activities on a Saturday, you basically had to find a way to carve half a day out of classes etc. to run errands.

And to one of the parent's points, when the debate about Sunday store closing laws came up in Louisiana in the 80s, one of the arguments against making changes was that mom and pop stores, largely staffed by the owners, couldn't realistically open for seven days while, for the big chains, it was just a dollars and cents calculation.

> mom and pop stores, largely staffed by the owners, couldn't realistically open for seven days while, for the big chains, it was just a dollars and cents calculation.

When Poland enacted its ban on Sunday shopping, things worked the very opposite: the law allows a convenience store to stay open 7 days a week if it is owner-operated, and indeed these shops are the places on which people depend on Sundays.

implicit assumption that having things closed one day a week is bad.

It is perhaps less convenient, but that doesn't make it bad. Lived in an EU country until recently, where everything is closed on Sunday. It makes that day much more restful, and it doesn't take long to learn to get your shopping done on Saturday.

Also, it is still illegal to use power tools outside on Sunday. Which means you aren't disturbed by your neighbor's leaf blower.

Honestly, I prefer 1 day a week of true rest over more convenience but never a true rest.

By “got worse” I mean more stores started having Sunday hours, extending open hours on weekdays late into the night, and being open on holidays.

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