[QUOTE=Robert Foster;8509710]How about Brentwood or Canoga Park?

Brentwood, a district in LA, has an LA city library branch not open on Sunday. No problem. Brentwood borders Westwood, separated by the 405, and UCLA in Westwood is a half mile east of the freeway. Hundreds of well-heeled UCLA students live in Brentwood, and many commute by bike. UCLA has world class libraries, including college (Powell) with over 6 million books, as well as biomedical and law, science and engineering and arts.

You can read to your heart's content, and buy a cheap photocopy card to xerox as much stuff to take home as you can carry out. Or watch classic (or modern) movies and TV shows (one of the largest archives on the planet), or listen to music of any genre. Open til MN Sundays. I've been there until closing time on more than a few occasions, despite having no affiliation. You can too.

This being said, Brentwood is within LA city limits. LA Central Library is open 1-5, but why drive that far (15 miles), unless you want to take books home?

Canoga Park too is a district of LA, not an independent city. LA Central is about 45 minutes by car, UCLA 30 minutes on Sunday afternoons. Or just go next door to Thousand Oaks' library, a 20 minute drive.

This thread is about bike shops. A lot of people don't mind driving 30 minutes to get to one, particularly in LA. A goodly number of LBSs in LA and OC are happy to service customers on Sundays, which is really nice. Others are closed, and nobody has any cause for complaint that their *nearest* one a mile from their home is one of these.

The needle about the library not being open Sunday 7:30 was an inane red herring. Nobody's wondering why LBSs can't be open at 7:30 Sunday evenings, are they?

Again, LBS owners can do whatever they want. It's a free country. Maybe the ones open on Sunday like the social engagement of weekend business. Others may not be enthralled dealing with newbies and leisure riders, the biggest category of Sunday customers, instead wanting to be racing their mates, and they may think they can't afford to have employees cover the shop in their absence. That's their prerogative.

Or I can let Dick's and this economic downturn either give at least one LBS owner hereabouts motivation to scrap a little harder to stay in business. Or if their lassitude lets Dick's establish a service-deficient bike sales model, I could do repair work in my garage at hours convenient to me (or at emergency-service rates at inconvenient hours, ala plumbers).

Are you assuming people open bike shops to encourage people to ride? To impart your knowledge? For you that might work for others it might be simply because it allows them access to something the love and freedom for others setting their schedual. If it was simply to make all the money they could opening a bike shop seems like a bad idea.
https://nbda.com/page.cfm?pageID=70
I don't know if when you used the term, my bike shop, if you were talking about the one you own or the once to go to. But if someone had money to invest and were simply interested in making money there ae a lot of businesses with a bigger return. But the reason most LBS owners I have talked to use is that they like bikes and it gives them a chance to be close to what they like and the freedom to run it the way they want. If they wanted to make the most money they could most of them would still be with JPL, Xerox, IBM, GMAC where they could get a big check. If I happened to be the owner of a bike shop and I wanted to be closed on Wednesday, or Saturday, or whatever day that is just when I would be closed. But if it ever got so complicated that I had to be open seven days a week, I would sell and retire. But that is just me.

[QUOTE=Eclectus;8510827]Good attitude about Brentwood not being open. Just go somewhere else. Same with Canoga Park or any number of other places like Eagle Rock. And that is just what point someone was trying to make to the Librarian that wanted the LBS to be open on Sunday. You last paragraph is part of the reason people own their own business. So it is not anger that causes the responses that have been delivered it is preferences. Like it was pointed out early on, it is their business and they have put their money where their mouth is. Until someone has dug into their bank account to finance the plan to quick wealth their suggestions might be put on the back burner. If you were going to open one you would have a business plan I am sure. Unless you didn't need bank financing. Got to the NBDA site I posted in the other post and see who the best customers tend to be. See how often the Casual rider might drop in on any given day. Then when you have those numbers in your folder you could decide what the best days to be open or closed are. And maybe you might understand how in the world some silly LBS owner could decide they didn't want to be open on a particular day.

You are wrong.
It is a thread about convenience. The OP wanted the bikeshop open on Sunday because that would be convenient for him. I want the library to be open late because that is convenient for me.

There was also something about using a college library. The local college does not let you check out books if you are not a student. I do not want to spend several hours in the library in order to read a book, not convenient. Neither is hanging out at a Borders/Barns&Noble(I only buy books from the local book shop anyway)

Again, I ask -- WHY open a bike shop at all? If all you want to do is live with bikes, then get a higher-paying job to work in the daytime and spend your evenings snuggled up with a dozen bikes in your basement.

Having a shop means being out among the public. There has to be a purpose for making yourself publicly accessible. You can't be a chain lube-covered hermit and run a shop.

Most organized rides are on Sundays...at least where I live, along with most races. As I also pointed out in a previous and apparently ignored post, Sundays are typically the only day of the week they can probably spend any time at all with their families. I don't own a bike shop, but have worked in quite a few and have friends that do own them. I do own a small retail business and am very well aware of the demands and limitations of making a living in the retail sector. If you don't work or haven't worked as a small business OWNER you probably have little or no clue what really goes on.

Aaron

I don't own a bike shop. Yet I don't think I'm at all ignorant of how a bike shop is more part of the service industry than plain old commodity retail.

I've spent all my time working in the service industry (in one form or another) where my hours are dictated by people outside my direct workplace. Deliver pizzas 'till 1 AM? You got it, sir. Take phone calls for a software developer at 6 AM my time because they're on the west coast and don't open their call center for another two hours? Yes sir, right away, sir. Perform at a scholarship foundation fundraiser in Illinois on a Friday night? Give me a seat on a plane and a hotel room and I'm there. One of my juniors at work gets in a car wreck in the middle of the night? As soon as I find my shoes, I'm out the door.

I'm close enough with my LBS to know why they don't carry certain brands anymore. Hell, I even know the sexual orientation of almost everyone in the shop. I know that, on most days during the week, they're losing money on the retail side, maybe moving only a couple accessories an hour. I also know that they're selling multiple bikes every single friggin' weekend.

They can afford to be closed on Tuesdays. They can't afford to be closed Sundays.

But could they if someone working in a library wanted them to be open on tuesday because that is when they wanted it open? That was the point.

Um, the title of the thread says "Sundays"............

You failed to prove your first allegation and corollary, by not disclosing the about 200,000 population city you live in without public library evening hours.

Do we just have a semantic quibble? You view "public library" only as one operated by a city or county department, and I view "public library" as any library owned by a government agency that the general public is allowed to use for its elightenment, and even entertainment.

At UC libraries, members of the public can peruse reference and archival materials at their leisure by requesting them, that no one is allowed to take out the door, and the librarians are absolutely gracious in retrieving them, providing assistance and advisement, as librarians in general are. (They don't make as much money as they could doing something else, but they love their books and booky things just as much as LBS owners love bikes and bikey things.)

Since many public university libraries have "Friends of the Library" type programs that enable general public members to borrow materials, even the non-borrowing-privilege limitation on first glance is not absolute. You just have to enquire.

You may have more "public library" service in your city than you realize.

Sorry, I don't have to prove anything. You're the one that got caught posting BS, not me.

Yes it does but think about it. The bike shop you are talking about picked the slowest day for then how? Flipping a coin? I doubt it. I believe the owner saw an advantage to being open a different day because there was a customer base on Sunday they didn't have on Tuesday. I don't think they we stupid for picking that day. So if someone came in and said, hey I ride my bike onve a month on Tuesdays what isn't that bike shop open on Tuesdays someone like you or the owner would say? "Because I felt that was the best day to be closed. End of story.

But here is some questions a owner has to ask. Will I receive ordered parts on Sunday? Can I order parts of Sunday? Who are my best paying customers? When do they come in to buy or order parts? UPS and Fed Ex don't deliver on Sunday nor does USPS. The factory order desk is closed Sunday. So for someone like me being open on Sunday does absolutly no good. If I go in to order they can't order till Monday. If they get me next day delivery I can't pick it up till Wednesday. So my LBS knows their customers and what days work best for them. Just like your LBS knows his customers even if it isn't the same as the one I go to. So theanswer to the origional question is, the bike shop is closed on Sunday because that was the best day to be closed according to the man that took money out of his bank account and bought the store. End of story. If I lived where you do and my shop was closed on Tuesday more than likely I would find another shop because I don't want to wait three days for ordered parts of supplies. And because there are two other shops open within 3 miles of me on Tuesday it would be easy to do. I have a road bike, a MTB and a Simi recumbent I bought from the same shop and I have fewer bikes than most of our club. I say again, the person most qualified to decide what day to be open is the owner of the LBS the OP has a question about.

Last Sunday we did mid $600, last Tuesday we did a little over $5000.
I would have to check them all, but except for the weeks right before Christmas Sundays average can't touch a weekday average.

And we have to short staff during the week to cover the hours for Sunday, because there are X dollars for payroll. So a day where we typically do more business has fewer employees so we can staff on a day that typically has less business.

Point made. +1

Riiight

Yeah, they must have put more thought into it. Because, as was so solidly proven,

- they knew they'd miss out on over $4000 worth of sales.

Wait... that doesn't make sense.

Sorry, point not made. Try again. Maybe you'll figure it out by the time you retire.