Is anyone only open 6-days a week? I’m looking at a small independant shop that currently was closed on sundays and was not open for lunches during the week, except fri/sat.
Does anyone else follow this format? I use to own a franchise and it was 7-days a week, 11-11. I would not mind starting off slow since I’ve been out of the game a few years, but it seems most indpendant shops have these types of hours.
nobody commits the 6-day only sin :twisted:
Well I guess chalk me up as a “sinner” then. We’ll be open in (I hope) about 6 weeks, but we long ago made up the very firm decision that we would NOT be open on a Sunday. It has a lot to do with my “screen-name” to be sure, but I do believe in the “on the 7th day He rested” clause in that big book of books.
In the last business I owned I decided the same thing, figured if I was going to go broke I could do it just as well working 6 days a week as 7. 
we have been lucky enough to be closed Sundays for over 10 yrs now…it would be my 3rd busiest day of the week but having that light at the end of the tunnel is PRICELESS. Whatever you do make sure to stand by your decision and don’t switch because it will definitely confuse your customers…Major plus is that your employees will appreciate it as well
EXACTLY…light at the end of the tunnel. That way everyone can have one worry free day off that they can bank on.
We too are closed on Sundays, and thats probably been the best decision I’ve made yet lol.
Oh and btw…
http://www.pmq.com/tt/viewtopic.php?t=6 … ht=sundays 
Closed Sunday AND Monday since we opened. Our market is so small that we really are better off for it for a while yet.
It all depends on what your purpose in life is…If you want to make as much money as you can, then that may involve lunch and dinner 7 days a week…If you want to have a life then you can close 1 or 2 days per week…In my last pizza place we varied between 7 days and being closed Sunday and Monday and did not notice much of difference in weekly sales…But with being closed staff and owners were happier…
Royster13 has a good point.
Purpose is primary. 3 P’s in decision making: People, Purpose, Profit. Can you take care of the people (customers and staff) achieve your primary purpose in the community and do so with a profit? If your goal is to create a business which creates plenty of cash for the purpose of selling in the future and retiring early… that may change your purpose.
Since a pizza restaurant serves its local community, you can easily create marketing material (both offline and online) that will keep the customers informed. If you are looking for balance, I have seen plenty of small businesses do fine with six days. (caution: pizza + football + sports needs to be a consideration for which day you might close) The owners are happy and paying the bills (and do not look at the missing sales as a negative since they gain so much on the seventh day)
I have a simple breakeven spreadsheet you can download in my library and take a look at the different scenarios (sales with 6 days, 5 days or 7 days). http://rejuvenateyourrestaurant.com It’s free… help yourself.
Also, if you use tech for those who call on a closed day, you can offer a special offer for the next time the call. Each week leave a code on an answering machine, a “secret” website page, something special foir the next time they visit. Also, with such things as VoIp you can track the calls … and with caller ID you can track who called and return the call the next day with a special invitation… thereby maintaining good relationships. Don’t forget: your website can offer support should your customers need more information on the day you close.
Being open for lunch is usually a different market than the dinner. Different group of people with different habits. You need a new separate marketing strategy for lunch. Many start with dinner… and then as business grows, add lunch. This depends on your time / team / finances.
Hope the spreadsheet helps.
well here every pizza place (that isnt a chain) are closed on sunday here in my market.
So what I did was find one person that I can trust for one day. I was lucky, I found a lady who worked many many years in the pizza industry and now is a stay at home mom. she works one day. Sunday my only day off.
I pay her well, REALLY well for one day, this keeps her very happy, I very rarely ever have to come in and sales are like an additional saturday for us. To me its the best of both worlds as No one can work every day, I need that one day even if its just to have some free time to myself…
But Rockstar do you really have idea if you have actually gained overall sales or are the sales on Sunday just taken from other days of the week?..And this may very well be a rhetorical question that does not have an answer or at least as answer that is easy to figure out…When I took over the last pizza place I owned, we starting closing Mondays…After a while we closed Sundays but our sales pretty much stayed the same…So in my mind I still made as much money as I was going to and i had a life…
Or perhaps you operated your store better than the previous owner and you were gaining customers and market share. Maybe if you had continued to be open 7 days instead of having steady sales, your sales may have increased. Unfortunately most will only find out the answers to these scenarios if they make a decision that causes a very bad result. My store is open 17 hours a day 7 days a week. That doesn’t mean that I am there all day every day. I have 30 employees to take care of the store when I am not there. Would my sales and profitability decrease if I cut my hours? I’m guessing yes, but I’m not going to find out. Besides, my employees rely on me to provide them with their fulltime hours and I would have to lose some of them if I were to close a day or two per week.
I know its hard to tell if those people would order monday or saturday (conditioned)
BUT I do see a drop in sales when we are closed like on easter sunday,
and we werent always opened, we had a 20 percent growth over last year, I dont know how much was contributed to sundays. its a variable that is VERY hard to pin point
And I was in a small market, just 5,000 residents…That makes a big difference I am sure…
We are closed on Sundays. Best decision we ever made (probably 10 years ago). It is nice when doing the schedule too. I believe someone far more wiser than I made the decision and He was right. We all need a day of rest.
Kris
definitely CLOSED SUNDAYS.
We’re open 7 days and I work Sundays.
If we closed Sundays and I had the day off I would have to visit the in-laws so for me OPEN 7 DAYS !!! :lol:
Dave
we are open 365 days a year, being in a resort town we can never close nor would we want to, holidays and Sundays are the biggest days.
If you need a day off, take the day off. Hire good people. No reason to give up quality of life in order to have a day off.
Pizza is an impulse buy. Delivery is a convenience. People looking for a good meal that they don’t have to prepare may not need it tommorow. I have no doubt what-so-ever that closing Sunday or any other day would be loss of sales. Aside from the fact that Sunday is the third or fourth best day of the week and would not be the day to close, with a tourism based ecomomy, there is no assurance that the customer looking for dinner on Sunday will be even be in town let alone looking for a meal on some other day.
Sundays are about 12% of our week on average.