Small Business Store Advice: Changing Your Opening Hours by Liquor Store Profits

Liquor Profits Store Revenue Optimization

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Small Business Store Advice: Changing Our Opening Hours Alex Flasinski, Store owner + online expert

www.LiquorStoreProfits.com

SMALL BUSINESS STORE ADVICE: CHANGING OUR OPENING HOURS WRITTEN BY: ALEX FLASINSKI

Optimizing your liquor or wine store hours are important to maximize sales, efficiency, and time. So, I've decided to start opening our liquor store at 12pm noon every day. Starting January 1st. Currently we open at 10am Monday through Saturday, and on Sunday because of the law in my area, the earliest we can open up is 12pm. We're going to be switching. Now, every day we're going to open at 12pm noon and I'm going to keep the closing hours the same. Currently, Monday through Thursday we close at 8pm, Friday and Saturday we close at 10pm and Sunday at 7pm.

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The new hours are going to be 12pm noon to those times. Why am I doing this? Well, the honest reason, like the biggest reason is because I've been just thinking about it for a while. I opened and closed the store myself. I don't really mind. We used to open at 9am and for example on Thursdays we used to close at 10pm. I'm used to having the 80 hour work weeks. That kind of thing it's not that bad because once you have a cashier in place, once you have the right systems in place in your store, like we do here, you don't have to be busting your butt all day, like running around and doing stuff. I mean, is it busy? Yeah, of course, but there is time to get other stuff done that you really want to focus on. For example, I have side projects that I work on. I have a lot of stuff that I do other than just working at this liquor store, while I'm actually working at this store during the day / night. The biggest reason I am doing this is because I'm a big fan of the pareto principle, which is 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, efforts, actions, or whatever. What that basically means is that the majority of our business probably comes from about 20% of our opening times. WWW.LIQUORSTOREPROFITS.COM

It applies to a bunch of stuff like it doesn't necessarily have to be 80/20. It could be like 95% of your business comes from 5% of your customers, or from 5% of your opening hours. It could also be 16% of your business comes from 40% of the opening hours. For us, and I'm sure for you, the busiest time is basically after 5pm. I think that that's because generally the bulk of people get out of work at 4 or 5pm and so what happens is you're out of work and now you have a little bit of time to run your kind of errands. That's when you go to the store and everybody's moving around. So you go to the liquor store, you go to the grocery store, you gotta do what you got to do, pick up your kids or whatever, get all that stuff done. That's why I think sales go from 5pm to 8pm. Obviously, it's not the most beneficial thing for business for me to bump up the opening hours from 10am to noon. But like I said, the biggest reason is actually I want to see what happens. Last year in January, we did $170,000 in revenue, which is a lot more than we did two years ago in the same month. That was about an almost 40% increase over two years. So it was a very big jump. Which is from advertising, which I'll talk about if you guys want me to, but that's another thing. 4

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For the new year, I want to see if we can get through January and do at least $170,000, even if it's a little bit less, it's not going to be less. I hate when it's less, but I hope it's not going to be less. But even if it's $170,000 or more then as far as I'm concerned, that's cool. Worst case scenario it's going to be like a trial run in January. If it doesn’t work we'll go back to the way things were before, opening up at 10am starting February. But I'm hoping that opening at 12pm noon works because we already have really low prices, and we always have a cashier behind the counter. I'm picking up phone calls and If I'm not picking up phone calls, somebody speaks for me. So questions are being answered, we're serving customers quickly and they're getting the best prices. I don't think there's going to be too much backlash. I think we may lose a handful of customers (hopefully not) because they're just going to be irritated if we are not open early like before. Let’s see what happens. Maybe if it works for my store, maybe it's something that you other liquor and wine store owners can consider. If I were a big business here, I most likely would not really be thinking about this. If I could afford to have a day manager and a night manager, and a day shift and then like an evening shift, and great help all day. Then I wouldn't really be considering this, but seeing as we are a small business, it's me and two full time cashiers, a full time stock guy and now thank God my cousin who's basically like a manager of sorts for me, almost like a partner, really. We're definitely small, but we're right between. There's no way I could hire another guy. You know, even with us, it's not really enough to be fully present for every customer all day, it's difficult. It's not difficult when you, when you're talking about weeks, but it is difficult when you're talking about a whole year. To keep consistency and like I said, to experiment, we're going to start opening up at 12pm. So let me know what you guys think, please. I will check the comments below. NOTE: January 2021 - We’ve been experimenting with opening and closing hours over the past year to see what works best. Depending on when you read this article, my Pike's Wine & Liquor store hours may already be slightly different than mentioned above. The key is to optimize and test what works for your store and geographic location. Every city and state has subtle differences that work best for that geographic location. Test, test, test. WWW.LIQUORSTOREPROFITS.COM

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