Is It Worth Being Open on Sunday?

 My quick answer is maybe. Here's my story and it might help you to decide if being open on Sunday is worth is for your shop. 

First off, when I moved into the Forrestal Village in 1998, I was required to have hours that matched the complex which meant I had to be open until 9 pm on Thursday and Fridays and had to be open on Sunday. 

As years went by and the stores in my complex left and turned into mixed use spaces such as offices, schools and doctors, those "rules" magically disappeared. The first thing I changed was to close at our normal time of 7 pm on Thursday and Fridays because with the fall of the other retail stores, there were no longer any late night shoppers walking around. 

The one thing I did not change were our Sunday hours. By then, our customers were used to our 7 day a week hours. I will admit that for years it was tough in the beginning. I found staffing on Sunday to be hard and had quite a few miss-steps but as time went on and the business grew, I found Sundays pretty easy to staff with at least one designer and one driver. Of course, if someone called out sick, Kevin and I had to fill in but for the most part it ran perfectly without us. 

The down and dirty is that you have expenses at the shop that don't change no matter how many days you are open. Your fixed overhead such as rent, mortgage (business loan), insurance, property taxes, etc stays the same and for the most part your utilities doesn't go up much (coolers run 24/7).  The only thing that really changes is your payroll. Being open on Sunday can be a great way to boost your store profits and gain new, loyal customers! 

*I will make one important point before I continue - don't decide to open on Sundays without committing many months to the effort. If you are not currently open on Sunday and you do it for only a few months or even weeks, you won't know if it's worth it or not. It takes a long time for your customers to realize this change and you won't know what it is doing anything positively financially for you. If you do it, make sure to market it on all your social media platforms, talk about it in emails, add it to signage and update your hours in your online listings.* 

Here are the advantages that we saw for being open on Sundays. 

• As a florist, you are expected to deliver Funerals and Parties on Sundays. I've noticed that in many shops, this seems to be left to the owner to handle as needed. You can go from having one day off a week to zero very quickly during party and funeral season. If you are open and staffed, it's easier to have an owners day off. I'm sure you know the financial value of providing social event decorations and creating funeral designs, so it's a no brainer when it comes to increasing your shop sales to automatically be available for these. 
• You'd be surprised how many people want delivery on Sunday for all those occasions such as birthday, anniversary and get well. Our driver Jeff found making deliveries to be much less stressful than those made during the week. Less traffic is always a positive thing when you are a driver! 
•  If no other shop in town is open and delivering on Sunday, this might be a great way to stand out and gain new customers. We had as many as 10-20 non-event deliveries on Sunday and many of those would not have accepted delivery on Saturday or Monday, resulting in loosing the order to a competitor who was also open on Sunday. 
• Having a designer working on Sunday gives you a great head start for the week. It's very stressful to come into the shop on Monday morning and find a batch of Monday delivery orders sitting on the computer waiting to be designed. With a designer on duty, all the Monday orders can be completed and ready to go for delivery. I know some say they are not busy on Monday but our shop name was Monday Morning Flowers, so Mondays were always busy for us!! 
  
• Sunday is a great day to reorganize your retail displays. My Designer Alanna used to love tearing up the front of the shop, rework the displays and give everything a deep cleaning. I always looked forward to walking in on Monday morning and seeing the magic she created in the shop!! 
• At one point when we had 2 locations and filled tons of orders for the wire services, we even had an additional shop person in the store to help out. In the long run having 2 stores and filling those orders was not a good idea. (Side note, if you are considering a second location, really think long and hard about it. If you are filling orders for the wire services and it's more than 5% of your sales, you may find it hard to remain profitable, don't be open just to fill their orders on Sunday). 
• If your shop was like ours, we received a lot of our flowers and supplies on Monday. Sunday is a great day to reorganize the cooler, freshen up existing flowers in the shop, scrub all the buckets and get the production area ready for that big shipment. 
• Because some Sundays were quiet, this gave Alanna time to create new designs for the website. When you are the only one in the shop, it can be stressful if it gets busy but the flip side, is it can be very peaceful and give you time to really think and be creative. Alanna loved working on Sundays. Light traffic to and from work and being able to work independently made for a great work day for her. She never complained and about working Sundays. I will say though, that you need a strong designer and they must be good at working independently.
• We had no problem charging extra for Sunday delivery. People were more than willing (especially after Covid) to pay a higher delivery fee for Sunday.  This might seem like a small thing, but it really added up. This extra money often paid for 1/2 of or even all the deliver drivers pay for the day, which makes it a huge win! 

There can be some reasons and disadvantages for being open on Sundays. 

• If you don't have reliable employees, you might end up filling in more often then you want. Over the years I had issues with Sunday staff. I had one designer who partied a lot on Saturday and was often hung over on Sunday (lol) and I had one driver who was often late getting in, making him late to set up parties. I found that having Full Time employees worked better than having Part Timers but wasn't always a guarantee of having a successful team. 
• If you are in a small town and other retailers are not open on Sunday, it's might not worth trying to be open. 
• If you don't have enough staff to squeeze out schedules to include employees on Sunday, don't do it, especially if it's going to toss them into over time every week. 
• Although I did not follow this rule myself in the early days, I suggest not being open on Sunday if you, as the owner, have to work it with out a day off. I did that for years because I had no choice but it's not good for your health and it's not worth it in the long run. 
• Don't do this if you don't have a strong, independent staff.  It's important to have someone who can handle anything that walks in the door. You could offer limited services but it's better if you are able to offer the services as you would on any other day of the week. I used to laugh when I would fill in on Sundays because I was a very weak designer. If someone came in needing a corsage, I didn't take the order because my corsage work was terrible. Luckily, the last 6 years we were in business, we no longer created dance flowers, which gave me a good out for making a corsage on the fly!! lol 
• Lastly, if you trying being open on Sundays for 6 months and find that your sales are not higher and your profits are not better, then you know you tried but it's not worth it. The goal is higher sales with higher profits, anything short of that makes it a no go. 

Before I go I want to give a shout out to my amazing Sunday Team - Alanna
and Jeff. They were amazing. When they were at the shop, Kevin and I didn't need to worry about anything. We could have our day off in peace knowing that everything was being taken care of of. Love you guys!!