The Hour Nobody Else Opens: Using Competitors' Trading Hours as Business Intelligence
Most businesses set their opening hours once, in the first month, and then never look at them again. They get inherited from the previous tenant, or copied from the place across the road, or chosen because that is when the owner likes to start.
Meanwhile every competitor within a mile is publishing theirs. Publicly. In a structured, machine-readable format, updated by them, free to read. Almost nobody reads it.
The question your own data cannot answer
Your till tells you when you are busy. It is very good at that.
What it cannot tell you is when you were closed and somebody wanted you. That demand does not appear anywhere in your figures. There is no row in any report for the person who tried the door at half four on a Sunday and went home.
This is the blind spot. Every internal measure you have is conditional on being open. Your quietest hour is measurable; your missing hours are not.
What the hours actually show you
Take every competitor you track and lay their weekly hours out as a grid. Seven columns, one row per business, an hour per cell.
Three things fall out of it immediately.
The first is the herd. Almost everyone in a given trade opens and closes at the same times, because they all copied each other. In a lot of UK high streets you will find eleven businesses opening at nine and closing at five, and a Sunday that is essentially unserved after four.
The second is the outlier, and outliers are informative in both directions. A competitor who opens an hour earlier than everyone else has either found something or is wasting an hour. Which one it is you can usually work out from how long they have been doing it. A trial lasts a month. A year is evidence.
The third is the gap: a block of time when demand plausibly exists and nothing in your area is open. That is the interesting one, and it is invisible from inside any single business.
Why the economics are better than they look
Here is where most owners talk themselves out of it.
The instinct is to divide total costs by opening hours and conclude that an extra hour has to earn that much to be worth it. On that arithmetic an extra Sunday hour looks hopeless.
That arithmetic is wrong, because most of those costs are paid whether you open or not. Rent does not care. Business rates do not care. Insurance, your accountant, your software, your broadband, the standing charge on your energy: all paid on a Sunday afternoon whether the lights are on or not.
The real cost of one more hour is the marginal cost: the staff on shift, and the variable part of your energy. That is a much smaller number, and it means the bar an extra hour has to clear is far lower than the average-cost figure suggests.
This is the single most common mistake in these decisions, and it goes both ways. It makes owners keep unprofitable hours open because "we've already paid the rent", and it makes them reject profitable ones because "an hour costs us forty quid". Same error, opposite conclusions.
The honest counterweight
Three things stop this being free money, and anyone who does not mention them is selling you something.
Staffing is lumpy. You cannot roster somebody for one hour. In practice you are deciding about a three or four hour block, and the maths has to be done on the block, not the hour.
Being open badly is worse than being closed. One person on, tired, at the end of a long day, is how you get the review that undoes a good week. If you cannot staff an hour properly, do not open it.
And demand has to actually exist. An empty hour is not an opportunity just because nobody else has taken it. Sometimes the herd is right and there is genuinely nobody about at eight on a Tuesday. The gap is a hypothesis, not a finding.
The reverse move, which is usually the bigger win
Everything above works in the other direction, and owners are far more reluctant to look at it.
If you are open during a block where four competitors are also open and your own takings for that block are consistently poor, that hour is costing you marginal cost for very little return. Closing it is not defeat. It is the same analysis with the sign flipped, and it frees the one resource that is genuinely scarce, which is your staff's good hours.
The businesses that get this right are rarely open longer overall. They are open at different times.
Bank holidays, which are the extreme version
The pattern that shows up most sharply is the day everyone shuts.
Demand on a bank holiday does not vanish. It concentrates, because the number of places serving it collapses. If you are one of two open instead of one of twelve, your share of a smaller pie can be considerably larger than your share of the normal one.
Whether that is worth it depends entirely on your staff and what you have to pay to get them in, which is a real cost and often the deciding one. But it is worth working out rather than assuming, because it is the one day of the year where the competitive landscape changes completely and predictably, and you can see it coming months ahead.
How to actually do this
You can do the whole thing by hand and it is worth doing once, manually, because you will learn more from the first pass than from any dashboard afterwards.
Pick your ten nearest genuine competitors. Not everyone in the postcode: the ten a customer would actually consider instead of you. Look up each one's hours. Put them in a grid. Mark the blocks where fewer than two are open.
Then, for each gap, ask the only question that matters: is there a reason to believe anyone wants this? Passing trade, a nearby event, a shift pattern at a local employer, a station, a hospital, a school run. If you cannot name the demand, there probably is not any.
Then trial it for a month and measure it against the marginal cost, not the average.
The part that has to be automatic
The problem with doing it by hand is that it is a snapshot, and hours change. Competitors extend for summer, cut back in January, close on a Monday and never announce it.
That is the case for having something watch it: not because the analysis is hard, but because the value is in noticing the change. A competitor quietly dropping their Sunday is worth knowing about the week it happens, not the next time you happen to check.
The intelligence here was never hidden. It is published, by your competitors, deliberately. It just sits in twelve separate places and nobody has ever put it in one grid.