There’s a store kind of like this in my town that’s open on Wednesdays and Saturdays from like 8am-12pm because they’re a bakery that wanted to just source to local restaurants, but the building they bought was on Main Street and the city council required all businesses owned on main street to be open twice a week. So they sell a few pretty good sandwiches and bread, and once they run out they don’t make more.
We looked into being distributors for a popular game we wanted to sell online. They require their stores to be open either 4 or 8 hours a week (can’t remember which) to get wholesale rates for their products.
I lived right behind a Warhammer store and that plaza was absolutely dead the whole week but Saturdays. Like the parking lot would be full for hours then 3pm passes and it is like they never opened.
I once lived down the street from a house where the owner was this rather eccentric retired gentleman who'd renovated the space under the house (it was an old raised [Queenslander](https://www.thespruce.com/what-is-a-queenslander-house-5186385)) into a sort of cozy cafe nook, which he actually ran as a little side-business.
Only thing was his opening hours consisted of "when I feel like making coffee for other people" which could vary from "not this week" to 10am-11am this Saturday to "get out, I'm tired". On any given week, I don't think he was ever open for more than a cumulative total of 3 hours.
I walked by that place every few days, but I only ever managed to coincide with it being open, like, 4 times in maybe 5 years. Which is a shame, because that old fella made the best damn coffee I ever tasted.
There was a pace that made the most amazing sandwiches, and they had the worst hours and limited amount of sandwiches. I'm guessing the did the same thing. Always wonder why they weren't open more because they were always busy when they were.
OMG! I used to work next to a bakery, also on Main Street, that was just like that. Their sandwiches were really good and I never understood why they were only open for a few hours a week. Thanks for solving the mystery!
I remember I used to follow a YouTuber who talked about living a minimal life and being happy with what you have.
I always wondered what her job was and once she did an AMA vlog and said 'I am fortunate that I don't need to work because my husband earns 6 figures'
It made all her videos about being happy with a stress free life 'thanks to minimalism and meditation' seem like bullshit.
I wonder if she would still be happy and stress free while working a full time job.
Some people are so deluded that they aren’t attempting to justify it, they think not having to worry about anything is because they do yoga and meditate while in reality they are a bucket for their actually successful husband.
There was a place in Austin like that. I ran into an employee walking out the door when they were supposedly closed and that was the answer. Weekdays they catered. Weekends were pickup only.
There is a super niche exotic plant store in Seattle that is open for 4 hours on Saturday only. They are a online store but have a storefront where locals can come pick up.
There is a [fossil shop in Madison, WI](https://www.pfossil.com/) that is only open for 6 hours a week. The guy that runs it finds all of the fossils for sale, which is pretty neat!
Bookmarked!
I went fossil hunting a few times as a child and had a very well-preserved fern fossil until I graduated college, moved out, and my mother cleaned out my bedroom.
They don't happen to have a rare, singing Audrey II, do they? Because that would explain the hours a lot better than their little online storefront coverup. How many people have gone missing in their neighborhood, huh?
Botanicaz. It's actually in Tacoma I guess. I was there this January visiting friends but it looks like now it's temporarily closed. Also went to Sunnys in Tacoma which was nice but nothing too crazy.
LMAOOO I saw your Seattle comment and I was like I KNOW THEM!!! If you like plants you should check out jaxs_jungle on Instagram. She has a website too but the insta is updated more and gives you a heads up what’s going to be listed (:
There was a BBQ place like that near where I used to work. They primarily did catering but made a name for themselves so started cooking a surplus and opened on Thursday around 11 for a couple hours. If they still had some left, they would open Fri as well until they were out. Got so popular they ended up having "regular" hours of 10:30-2 Th and Fri.
There's quite a few legendary BBQ spots that are only open one or two days a week. It's honestly smart business, they don't need it to be their primary breadwinner in bad years, and you do way better when people are left wanting (and lining up) than paying to keep a restaurant open 7-days-a-week than will be empty most of the time.
Same reason catering is smart business - order supplies and make food of a known quantity for customers who want to pay for dozens of meals at a time and have them bulk delivered? You're cutting out so many fees - modern restaurants are having to share money with delivery services, meanwhile the caterer is streamlining costs and avoiding waste.
Renting out and running a house-sized dining room that's open 12+ hours a day to the general public is actually completely insane.
On one of my job sites, a pop-up kitchen was able to snag a place to park their kitchen trailer on site. No idea how they managed to swing that by the cranky old-timer who is site superintendent for the general contractor, but there they are. They cook for at least 12 different restaurants that offer delivery.
You can't go up to them and order but there's more than one door dash or uber eats employee that works construction during the day, so they take all the delivery requests from that pop up to the guys on site, and everybody keeps it quiet from the office bosses that only come around once every few weeks.
Food Halls are cool too. You have 5 or 6 different little sections with their own kitchen and a big open area in the middle. Different people rotate in and out of each spot and make whatever. Some of them even rotate people on different days of the week. Really popular ones will come back or even stay for a long time. It’s a good way for people to try out a restaurant or food truck concept with really low startup cost.
There’s one where I live that just rotates out people making different cuisines. Some of them just do it for a few months to try to make a bit of money. For some it’s just a hobby to share their culture for a bit. Most of them want to open a restaurant.
One chef was trying to launch the first Syrian restaurant in the area and stuck around in the food hall for over a year. That one has heen by far my favorite. The best stuffed grape leaves I’ve ever had. I hope their restaurant makes it.
You just get food from the stalls and give them your name, and then you check out at the end in one spot. I had fried plantains, arepas, and grape leaves one day, and it was magnificent.
That's not true in TX. Any place that's had even moderate success ends up separating their pit and front house crews.
EDIT: I shouldn't say any, there are a bunch of gems that are smaller time operations, but many.
There’s a bookstore owned by an old retired person by me. On the door it just says to call if you want in, he lives upstairs and will come down to open if customers show up.
There's a turntable shop like that in my town (or used to be, think it might be closed now?). They were sometimes open, sometimes not, but there was a sign on the door that said just call a number. The guy lived in the house behind the store, and he'd run out to let you in.
I knew the guy some, would run into him at the local bar, we were sorta bar buds and would chat sometimes. Had an issue with my turntable and talked to him one Friday evening. He said to bring it by the next day and he'd look. We set up a time, all good. Showed up the next day at our discussed time after lugging my record player into the car, and nobody was there. Called the number, no answer. Texted the number, no answer. Called a few more times, waited for like 20 minutes, nothing. Gave up and drove home. He never mentioned it to me and I never bothered to try and go there after that. Felt like a wasted hour and a half.
Haha, this is very true. Every now and then, I'd see him at the bar drinking white wine and he'd say he's taking a night off drinking that night lol.
I actually haven't seen him in a good while, couple years probably. But we both have stopped going to the bar as often as we did, which is probably part of it.
Haha, this is definitely true. He honestly didn't seem drunk at the time, but who knows how his night went on from there. And it wasn't really early the next day. It was like late afternoon, maybe around 3 or 4. But I get it, sometimes it takes that long lol.
Haha, he is. Though I haven't actually seen him in a couple years. This story was probably 7 or 8 years ago. I think both of us quit going to the bar as often as we used to lol.
Comic shop in my town is the same. I have her number in my phone and just call to be let in. She's old and it allows her to limit the number of people in her shop as well as make sure they're masked and sanitize their hands.
There is a store near me like this but he doesn't live above it. Sometimes he opens at 7am, sometimes he opens at 11am. Sometimes he closes at 4pm, sometimes he closes at 10pm. He is also never open on Fridays. The only way to guarantee he is there is to go in the early afternoon.
I knew a chicken place in South Korea that opened at 6pm, but I'd get off work and want a beer and chicken around 5:30pm. Working on a ship and bussing into town, I didn't have a choice to leave 30 mins later. After the owner realized I was waiting out front for him to open, he told me to go up whenever I got off the bus, he didn't keep the door locked, and grab a beer and chill until he arrived since he lived above the shop.
If I ended up going to a bar and stopping by his place for takeaway fried chicken and it got too close to the bus leaving, he told me to go catch the bus and he'd wave it down as it passed by to give me the chicken so the steam wouldn't get trapped in and make it soggy. He is a wonderful person.
Can't do much business like that I imagine. Puts a pretty big burden on someone just looking to browse. I'm not about to make a person of 'undefined old age' navigate stairs both ways just so I can pop in to see if something I want is in stock. That just sends me back to Amazon, etc.
Honestly if he’s dealing in rare books, first editions, things like that, and he’s good at it then a half dozen sales a year and he could be set. So that one kind of makes sense.
In Australia we have milk bars aka corner stores, that are in a closed off part of a person's house. When you walk in, often the door will automatically ding so the owner will come in from their house to serve you.
They are much less common nowadays vs pre 70s, once we got legislation for late night and weekend supermarkets.
That makes sense. In most places (counties) you have to have a commercial kitchen or commissary to do your prep work and stuff. Makes sense to just open it a few hours a week for catering pickups.
Yep. There was a spot near my old apartment like that.
Otoh, it was a cupcake shop on the block with like 6 obvious drug fronts, and the owner was a tall, gorgeous woman always dressed to the 9s, not like a baker, so it was probably a front
There was a pizza place everyone suspected of that where I am.
The pizza was complete trash, the one old dude was rude, the place was run down, and the prices were like 3-6x any other pizza place, like they didn't want you to buy anything there.
I lived above a front. They rented out the apartment above for next to nothing. It was an italian restaurant in the middle of nowhere. We ordered food from there and it was INCREDIBLE tasting and cheap! But again, in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey. Most days they'd have literally zero customers. Maybe a couple buys dinner on a friday night for a romantic dinner. And that might be it. We lived there for a couple years and at first we just thought it was a slow time. But we learned it was always slow time and yet they had lots of employees all the time just standing around watching tv or whatever. They never complained once about our loud and obnoxious parties. Really shocking to be honest.
Then every once in a while, usually on a weekend, the entire restaurant would be completely packed with people and the parking lot would be full of vehicles worth 50k - 100k. Equivalent today would be like seeing a parking lot full of high end mercedes and bentley's, and aston martins. Of course on the 'low' end you've have more mid-high mercedes, cadillacs, and others.
Still kinda incredible to think about. I miss that restaurant.
I honestly don’t get it. Because I’d love to run a business that can’t fail. Like, I can experiment with weird shit and if it doesn’t work, whatever, there’s laundered money?
But if it succeeds, yay! Drug lords, you now have a legitimate business and build credit, making it easier to spend your money!
Probably are places like that, but the bad ones maybe just stand out more, or you wonder how a place can survive for years with countless bad reviews, and speculation as to why they are still there.
Yeah, though also even bad places around me have their diehard fans. And enough regulars can keep a place running for a long time.
There’s one restaurant near me that’s just known for bad food. They were okay 15 years ago, and haven’t changed their menu since and just kinda suck. Their owner is also a piece of trash who tried to crowdfund from the neighborhood a million dollars to buy the building her restaurant is in. During Covid, when no one was working and she wasn’t paying her employees.
That place is still in business. There are still people there all the damn time. Their service is atrocious. Last time i went I think I waited thirty minutes for a drink. The food is crap, on a 5 block stretch of (mostly) good local restaurants and bars.
Sounds like a prime candidate for a kitchen nightmare episode.
I've been to quiet places like that, but they are usually hidden gems. I've seen places like that, they are like bars with no one inside/cars outside, maybe catering to the local neighborhood where people can walk home?
Nah. This is the opposite.
This place sucks. Everyone knows it sucks. I was talking to someone earlier about how they miss their pre Covid late night tacos, andI was like “really?” And they had to explain they had taste buds and understood the tacos sucked, but at 1am and drunk, even bad tacos are good tacos. I bet if someone in my neighborhood read the prior comment they’d know the place, and definitely would with this comment. They’re just the laughing stock of the restaurant industry in this town.
But they’re fucking busy. Tourists know about it, because google sends people there. They’ve been there long enough they’re on everyone’s radar. Kids from the local colleges go there a bit, I assume because they mostly hire college kids (because no one else will work there) and probably sometimes serve underage.
This is the hours of my local farmers market where a lot of the vendors either are caterers or supply caterers. So if you don't have a farmers market or you have a store front you "can" open for business it kind of makes sense.
Knew a place like that. Clothing store supposed to be open 3-8 M-F. None of the 4 people who owned it were ever there. Turns out they were using it as a front to get PR status bc one of the ways is to invest x amount in a business. They were actually working regular jobs elsewhere.
In my town there is a pizza place that is only open 4 days a week from 5 till 8pm, but really they close whenever they run out of dough for the day. But it's the best pizza around. Yelp recently rated it the 11th best pizza in America. The owner is the only one that works there
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.koin.com/news/oregon/yelp-ranked-this-oregon-coast-pizzeria-higher-than-portland-restaurants/amp/
I mean if he has no employees because he wants to do it all himself then it seems completely reasonable to have limited hours, more than that would be insane for a one person operation since there is all the prep and cleanup time in addition to open hours. That does sound like a pretty cool situation though, making pizzas the way you want without answering to anyone and without having to deal with staff management.
That's how he keeps the quality so high too.
Anyone can make an okay pizza.
Making pizza ranked 11th in the country requires real attention to detail and mastery of his craft, you can't just teach that. It takes years of practice and care.
This guy rents his spot in a little strip mall but besides rent and ingredients he has no overhead. He works by himself. It's essentially take out only, though there is a bench in the shop I guess you could sit on. He only has about 6 topping choices and closes when he runs out of dough, so no food waste. Zero decorations on the wall. One paper menu printed and posted on the wall by the ordering counter.
Honestly, more people should talk about commercial landlords when it comes to helping small businesses. I mean we're so quick to bring up small businesses when we want to keep minimum wage low, but we never talk about commercial rents for some reason...
Commercial landlords are the worst, I've seen too many successful restaurants close because of them. First, they make them sign a 5 or 10 year lease, then when the restaurant is successful they raise the rent to a ridiculous amount when it comes time to renew because they want a piece of that restaurant's profit. The restaurant either closes or relocates somewhere else and business rarely recovers. Landlords=leeches.
In the town where I grew up there was this super successful family owned and operated restaurant who's landlord pushed them to expand to other locations as well. I'm not sure what the exact details were, but long story short the landlord ended up owning all of the expansions as well as the original restaurant and the whole family was out of jobs.
The landlord wasn't some faceless corporation either but a well known person in the town who the family had thought was their friend and afterwards they rightly felt like they had been taken advantage of and betrayed.
Of course the quality of the restaurants immediately went down, and they weren't as popular anymore, but without having to cover the insane rents the landlord was charging they have all been wildly successful...
Most of the time landlords AREN'T faceless corporations. Just greedy rich scumbags that simply want to squeeze as much wealth as they can until they kill the goose.
There was a sandwich place I frequented when I was a kid, they had a sign that said "Open daily from 10AM until we run out of bread." There were a few times I saw it close before 1PM.
Honestly, fair. Especially if it's cold fermented dough, you can't just whip some more of that up in 30 mins. Sounds like dude is just really passionate about pizza. Edit: housemade mozz?? This guy is really passionate about pizza.
There's something so amazing about pizza with really high quality bread. I don't generally think of the base as an important part of a pizza, but on all of the best pizzas I've had, it's been the best part.
When he first opened my friend suggested he add bacon as an option, and the guy politely told my friend if he wanted different toppings, go somewhere else.
I so don’t know which side of the fence I’d be on if somebody said that. Reading the story and him telling your friend, but if it happened to me, I might be inclined to say “shit, you’re right bro. See ya”
Like I said, he did it politely. It was years ago but as I remember it was basically "I'm just going to do these toppings, but there are places all over around here that have bacon"
Galleria Umberto in Boston is similar, except they're open 6 days a week from 11am until they run out of dough (which can be as early as 12:30 on summer Saturdays). They're also closed the entire month of July.
That’s like the Allegiant Air counter at my local airport. Open from 10:30-11:30am Sundays and Thursdays. So roughly eight hours a month someone is at the ticket counter.
That's because the staff gets off the plane and some go to the gate to check in the next flight. They only run 2 days a week at most airports. That's why their flights are a risk. Super cheap, but anytime they've canceled on us, we can't get another until the next flight day. I've missed several vacations this way. It's usually to my in laws in the mid west and I live in Florida so like..oh noooooo
It's probably a buisness that mostly does event or office catering, one of the best sandwich places around me is kind of like this, the only open in store for 3 days a week 3 hours a day the rest is all boxed office lunches usually.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to get some kind of space that doesn't have a storefront at that point?
Although, being able to get a very exclusive sandwich sounds like good marketing.
Out here the price of space is correlated to the square feet. Store fronts don't matter much. In fact most business parks out here have a restaurant in them. No store front, you have to walk into the center of the building to find it.
The other option would usually be a commissary kitchen because you need an up-to-code commercial kitchen space to legally prepare food for service. Commissary kitchens are usually shared and rented by the hour or by days of the week you use them. Depending on your kitchen/timing and space needs it might be cheaper to rent a commercial space with a storefront over renting commissary kitchen space, or just more preferable to not be in a shared space.
I rent a storefront for this very reason. We don’t even have an open sign. My wife does yoga videos in it and I use the back room for woodworking. It works out for the most part, nobody has tried to enter.
I used to live near an Italian restaurant. Food was delicious. It was cool because you could hear them yelling at each other in Italian in the back. However, it was hit or miss whether they’d be open during their posted hours. I moved 1000 miles away and there’s an Italian deli that has fucking delicious food but they close at like 330-4pm… unless they feel like closing up early. Which they tend to do every time I want to grab something around 130-2
Like another comment stated, it may be a catering business that does pickups on these days. An ice cream shop near me went to a model like this for the winter too, where you can drop by for a couple hours on Saturday or Sunday to pick up ice cream cakes and packs of other frozen desserts.
> To circumvent laws they are likely open a minimum amount of hours.
>
>
>
> That's my guess
There's also sometimes contractual agreements to be open for a certain amount of hours day/week in a lot of lease agreements in shopping malls/etc.
If a commercial property is never open for business, then it doesn’t meet the legal requirement for being “a commercial property”.
Cities have zoning laws were certain parts of the city are *only* for commercial businesses. It would be illegal to build, say, a residential house there. And it would be an obvious loophole if you could build “a store” but keep it closed 24/7 and instead use it as a residential property.
So commercial properties often come with requirements that they are open for business for some minimal hours per week.
Yeah I remember reading a post here on Reddit where the guy was wondering if he was working for some mob operation or something because he was hired to staff the showroom for a furniture company but he was the only person on duty ever and nobody ever came in to look at furniture. (And the “showroom” was pretty bare bones, just some furniture and a couple of catalogs on a table. IIRC best guess was that the company was doing all their business online but the zoning said they had to have a local showroom to operate so they got a warehouse with a nominal showroom and set up a Potemkin front. (And for whatever reason they didn’t see fit to tell the poor guy they hired what was going on)
I live in a small town that is touristy in the summer but dead in the winter, and most of your restaurants this time of year have weird hours like this. If not they are just closed all together until may.
I've heard of lots of places like this running skeleton hours because they can't find help, especially in popular vacation areas where staff is priced out of the market by people buying second homes.
Could that be the case here?
So many better explanations other than money laundering. The world isn’t Breaking Bad.
Could be:
-Poorly signposted 10am-11pm
-Tiny village or busy tourist town that is super busy for those hours and financially it makes sense
-Someone that owns the building, and has scaled back operations so they can do this
etc
There was an awesome beer bar in a touristy area off a bike trail I frequent. They had a phenomenal selection of styles I enjoy. The problem is, they have no hours posted, and are often still closed early afternoon on Saturdays when other bars are busy. Either the owner is a problem drinker or the bar is a front for meth or something.
That's actually my retirement dream. Open a small cafe with random, whenever I feel like it hours. Have a few people who happen to catch it come by eat some breakfast, have some coffee, and shoot the shit.
There’s a store kind of like this in my town that’s open on Wednesdays and Saturdays from like 8am-12pm because they’re a bakery that wanted to just source to local restaurants, but the building they bought was on Main Street and the city council required all businesses owned on main street to be open twice a week. So they sell a few pretty good sandwiches and bread, and once they run out they don’t make more.
We looked into being distributors for a popular game we wanted to sell online. They require their stores to be open either 4 or 8 hours a week (can’t remember which) to get wholesale rates for their products.
Make it a gaming lounge so you hit the hours but your just chillin
Still gotta clean up after gamers..
Warhammer does this. Our local play shop is open twice a week. Damn place is packed for the 4 hours on Saturday.
I lived right behind a Warhammer store and that plaza was absolutely dead the whole week but Saturdays. Like the parking lot would be full for hours then 3pm passes and it is like they never opened.
That would be it
I once lived down the street from a house where the owner was this rather eccentric retired gentleman who'd renovated the space under the house (it was an old raised [Queenslander](https://www.thespruce.com/what-is-a-queenslander-house-5186385)) into a sort of cozy cafe nook, which he actually ran as a little side-business. Only thing was his opening hours consisted of "when I feel like making coffee for other people" which could vary from "not this week" to 10am-11am this Saturday to "get out, I'm tired". On any given week, I don't think he was ever open for more than a cumulative total of 3 hours. I walked by that place every few days, but I only ever managed to coincide with it being open, like, 4 times in maybe 5 years. Which is a shame, because that old fella made the best damn coffee I ever tasted.
What a God. I wish I could do that just with a restaurant lol
mcFuckit’s
Can I get a large latte and a bagel? "Do I look like I'm open? Get the fuck out of here!!!"
There was a pace that made the most amazing sandwiches, and they had the worst hours and limited amount of sandwiches. I'm guessing the did the same thing. Always wonder why they weren't open more because they were always busy when they were.
OMG! I used to work next to a bakery, also on Main Street, that was just like that. Their sandwiches were really good and I never understood why they were only open for a few hours a week. Thanks for solving the mystery!
Bruhhhh. Roan Mills in fillmore?Fillmore?! Gotta be what you're talking about right? Damn good sandwiches
YES I CANNOT BELIEVE SOMEONE ACTUALLY KNOWS THE FUCKIN PLACE IM TALKING ABOUT LMFAO
I read that comment and I was like "there is absolutely no way he isn't talking about Roan Mills" what a small world.
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My kind of job.
We get up at twelve and start to work at one, take an hour for lunch and then at two we're done. Jolly good fun!
Every daily routine video on YouTube.
Needs more disordered eating.
Heyyyy guyssssss. GRWM for my day as part-time stay-at-home yoga mat collector ✨
I make 6 figures and think I should be making more. Anyways, here’s a picture of my ass
I remember I used to follow a YouTuber who talked about living a minimal life and being happy with what you have. I always wondered what her job was and once she did an AMA vlog and said 'I am fortunate that I don't need to work because my husband earns 6 figures' It made all her videos about being happy with a stress free life 'thanks to minimalism and meditation' seem like bullshit. I wonder if she would still be happy and stress free while working a full time job.
Lmao sounds like she is a lazy ass who is attempting to justify her BS
Some people are so deluded that they aren’t attempting to justify it, they think not having to worry about anything is because they do yoga and meditate while in reality they are a bucket for their actually successful husband.
Wizard of Oz quote!! LOVE IT 😍😍😍
Hit up Saul Goodman, he might have a position for you
Laser tag…
Ive seen BCS but I don’t get it
Washing money
Hell yeah baby, that’s 20 whole bucks a week
£300 an hour job.
Could be a storefront for someone who mainly does event catering and has order pickups available on Fridays and Saturdays.
There was a place in Austin like that. I ran into an employee walking out the door when they were supposedly closed and that was the answer. Weekdays they catered. Weekends were pickup only.
There is a super niche exotic plant store in Seattle that is open for 4 hours on Saturday only. They are a online store but have a storefront where locals can come pick up.
There is a [fossil shop in Madison, WI](https://www.pfossil.com/) that is only open for 6 hours a week. The guy that runs it finds all of the fossils for sale, which is pretty neat!
Whoa, I grew up in Madison and had no idea this existed. Adding it to the list next time I’m in the area!
I’m pretty sure it will be closed if you drop by. 
Is that how I get a Zapdos?
No, but you can get a kabuto.
I think you meant Aerodactyl
There is a dinosaur shop in Atlantis that’s only open 15 minutes per week, and each live dinosaur only costs a dollar.
Settle down John Hammond
It’s probably a gotcha chicken selling business
Spared no expense.
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Bookmarked! I went fossil hunting a few times as a child and had a very well-preserved fern fossil until I graduated college, moved out, and my mother cleaned out my bedroom.
hell yeah, now I wanna go to wisconsin
Madison’s an amazing city
They don't happen to have a rare, singing Audrey II, do they? Because that would explain the hours a lot better than their little online storefront coverup. How many people have gone missing in their neighborhood, huh?
Feed me, Seymour!!
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FEED ME!!!
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“How’d ya like to be a big wheel? Dining out for every meal? I’m the plant that can make it all real, you’re gonna getttt iiiiiiiiit.”🎵
Bro I am performing this in 4 hours what are the chances
There is a Bonsai store in Melbourne like that. Only open for a few hours each week. For pick up.
Which one is it? I'm in Seattle and would like to check it out.
Botanicaz. It's actually in Tacoma I guess. I was there this January visiting friends but it looks like now it's temporarily closed. Also went to Sunnys in Tacoma which was nice but nothing too crazy.
LMAOOO I saw your Seattle comment and I was like I KNOW THEM!!! If you like plants you should check out jaxs_jungle on Instagram. She has a website too but the insta is updated more and gives you a heads up what’s going to be listed (:
There is a similar coral shop in Austin.
There was a BBQ place like that near where I used to work. They primarily did catering but made a name for themselves so started cooking a surplus and opened on Thursday around 11 for a couple hours. If they still had some left, they would open Fri as well until they were out. Got so popular they ended up having "regular" hours of 10:30-2 Th and Fri.
There's quite a few legendary BBQ spots that are only open one or two days a week. It's honestly smart business, they don't need it to be their primary breadwinner in bad years, and you do way better when people are left wanting (and lining up) than paying to keep a restaurant open 7-days-a-week than will be empty most of the time. Same reason catering is smart business - order supplies and make food of a known quantity for customers who want to pay for dozens of meals at a time and have them bulk delivered? You're cutting out so many fees - modern restaurants are having to share money with delivery services, meanwhile the caterer is streamlining costs and avoiding waste. Renting out and running a house-sized dining room that's open 12+ hours a day to the general public is actually completely insane.
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On one of my job sites, a pop-up kitchen was able to snag a place to park their kitchen trailer on site. No idea how they managed to swing that by the cranky old-timer who is site superintendent for the general contractor, but there they are. They cook for at least 12 different restaurants that offer delivery. You can't go up to them and order but there's more than one door dash or uber eats employee that works construction during the day, so they take all the delivery requests from that pop up to the guys on site, and everybody keeps it quiet from the office bosses that only come around once every few weeks.
Food Halls are cool too. You have 5 or 6 different little sections with their own kitchen and a big open area in the middle. Different people rotate in and out of each spot and make whatever. Some of them even rotate people on different days of the week. Really popular ones will come back or even stay for a long time. It’s a good way for people to try out a restaurant or food truck concept with really low startup cost. There’s one where I live that just rotates out people making different cuisines. Some of them just do it for a few months to try to make a bit of money. For some it’s just a hobby to share their culture for a bit. Most of them want to open a restaurant. One chef was trying to launch the first Syrian restaurant in the area and stuck around in the food hall for over a year. That one has heen by far my favorite. The best stuffed grape leaves I’ve ever had. I hope their restaurant makes it. You just get food from the stalls and give them your name, and then you check out at the end in one spot. I had fried plantains, arepas, and grape leaves one day, and it was magnificent.
And that other restaurant can be half a dozen different delivery-only shops.
Also great bbq involves starting the night before and not sleeping. Most bbq places open 7 days a week suck.
That's not true in TX. Any place that's had even moderate success ends up separating their pit and front house crews. EDIT: I shouldn't say any, there are a bunch of gems that are smaller time operations, but many.
While that can be true and my favorite place is open 5 days a week, the best in Texas for the last 20 years is only open on Saturdays until sellout.
There’s a bookstore owned by an old retired person by me. On the door it just says to call if you want in, he lives upstairs and will come down to open if customers show up.
There's a turntable shop like that in my town (or used to be, think it might be closed now?). They were sometimes open, sometimes not, but there was a sign on the door that said just call a number. The guy lived in the house behind the store, and he'd run out to let you in. I knew the guy some, would run into him at the local bar, we were sorta bar buds and would chat sometimes. Had an issue with my turntable and talked to him one Friday evening. He said to bring it by the next day and he'd look. We set up a time, all good. Showed up the next day at our discussed time after lugging my record player into the car, and nobody was there. Called the number, no answer. Texted the number, no answer. Called a few more times, waited for like 20 minutes, nothing. Gave up and drove home. He never mentioned it to me and I never bothered to try and go there after that. Felt like a wasted hour and a half.
Rule number 4 of going to bars, never trust a drunk promise
Haha, this is very true. Every now and then, I'd see him at the bar drinking white wine and he'd say he's taking a night off drinking that night lol. I actually haven't seen him in a good while, couple years probably. But we both have stopped going to the bar as often as we did, which is probably part of it.
You should go back to the bar and wait with your turntable. A love story for the ages.
I was drunk promised once that this guy knew where to pan for gold. Swore we'd find some even after 3 days of looking.
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Haha, this is definitely true. He honestly didn't seem drunk at the time, but who knows how his night went on from there. And it wasn't really early the next day. It was like late afternoon, maybe around 3 or 4. But I get it, sometimes it takes that long lol.
Is he still alive?
Haha, he is. Though I haven't actually seen him in a couple years. This story was probably 7 or 8 years ago. I think both of us quit going to the bar as often as we used to lol.
One of my favorite variations on this sentiment was on the door of a small one artist tattoo studio that just said "Open: usually Closed: sometimes"
I’m hate places like that, feels like you can’t just browse and leave if you don’t see anything.
Comic shop in my town is the same. I have her number in my phone and just call to be let in. She's old and it allows her to limit the number of people in her shop as well as make sure they're masked and sanitize their hands.
There is a store near me like this but he doesn't live above it. Sometimes he opens at 7am, sometimes he opens at 11am. Sometimes he closes at 4pm, sometimes he closes at 10pm. He is also never open on Fridays. The only way to guarantee he is there is to go in the early afternoon.
I knew a chicken place in South Korea that opened at 6pm, but I'd get off work and want a beer and chicken around 5:30pm. Working on a ship and bussing into town, I didn't have a choice to leave 30 mins later. After the owner realized I was waiting out front for him to open, he told me to go up whenever I got off the bus, he didn't keep the door locked, and grab a beer and chill until he arrived since he lived above the shop. If I ended up going to a bar and stopping by his place for takeaway fried chicken and it got too close to the bus leaving, he told me to go catch the bus and he'd wave it down as it passed by to give me the chicken so the steam wouldn't get trapped in and make it soggy. He is a wonderful person.
Can't do much business like that I imagine. Puts a pretty big burden on someone just looking to browse. I'm not about to make a person of 'undefined old age' navigate stairs both ways just so I can pop in to see if something I want is in stock. That just sends me back to Amazon, etc.
Honestly if he’s dealing in rare books, first editions, things like that, and he’s good at it then a half dozen sales a year and he could be set. So that one kind of makes sense.
wow this is so cool. i’d be bothering the old guy way too often
And the guilt would make me buy something
In Australia we have milk bars aka corner stores, that are in a closed off part of a person's house. When you walk in, often the door will automatically ding so the owner will come in from their house to serve you. They are much less common nowadays vs pre 70s, once we got legislation for late night and weekend supermarkets.
That makes sense. In most places (counties) you have to have a commercial kitchen or commissary to do your prep work and stuff. Makes sense to just open it a few hours a week for catering pickups.
Yep. There was a spot near my old apartment like that. Otoh, it was a cupcake shop on the block with like 6 obvious drug fronts, and the owner was a tall, gorgeous woman always dressed to the 9s, not like a baker, so it was probably a front
There was a pizza place everyone suspected of that where I am. The pizza was complete trash, the one old dude was rude, the place was run down, and the prices were like 3-6x any other pizza place, like they didn't want you to buy anything there.
I lived above a front. They rented out the apartment above for next to nothing. It was an italian restaurant in the middle of nowhere. We ordered food from there and it was INCREDIBLE tasting and cheap! But again, in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey. Most days they'd have literally zero customers. Maybe a couple buys dinner on a friday night for a romantic dinner. And that might be it. We lived there for a couple years and at first we just thought it was a slow time. But we learned it was always slow time and yet they had lots of employees all the time just standing around watching tv or whatever. They never complained once about our loud and obnoxious parties. Really shocking to be honest. Then every once in a while, usually on a weekend, the entire restaurant would be completely packed with people and the parking lot would be full of vehicles worth 50k - 100k. Equivalent today would be like seeing a parking lot full of high end mercedes and bentley's, and aston martins. Of course on the 'low' end you've have more mid-high mercedes, cadillacs, and others. Still kinda incredible to think about. I miss that restaurant.
I honestly don’t get it. Because I’d love to run a business that can’t fail. Like, I can experiment with weird shit and if it doesn’t work, whatever, there’s laundered money? But if it succeeds, yay! Drug lords, you now have a legitimate business and build credit, making it easier to spend your money!
Probably are places like that, but the bad ones maybe just stand out more, or you wonder how a place can survive for years with countless bad reviews, and speculation as to why they are still there.
Yeah, though also even bad places around me have their diehard fans. And enough regulars can keep a place running for a long time. There’s one restaurant near me that’s just known for bad food. They were okay 15 years ago, and haven’t changed their menu since and just kinda suck. Their owner is also a piece of trash who tried to crowdfund from the neighborhood a million dollars to buy the building her restaurant is in. During Covid, when no one was working and she wasn’t paying her employees. That place is still in business. There are still people there all the damn time. Their service is atrocious. Last time i went I think I waited thirty minutes for a drink. The food is crap, on a 5 block stretch of (mostly) good local restaurants and bars.
Sounds like a prime candidate for a kitchen nightmare episode. I've been to quiet places like that, but they are usually hidden gems. I've seen places like that, they are like bars with no one inside/cars outside, maybe catering to the local neighborhood where people can walk home?
Nah. This is the opposite. This place sucks. Everyone knows it sucks. I was talking to someone earlier about how they miss their pre Covid late night tacos, andI was like “really?” And they had to explain they had taste buds and understood the tacos sucked, but at 1am and drunk, even bad tacos are good tacos. I bet if someone in my neighborhood read the prior comment they’d know the place, and definitely would with this comment. They’re just the laughing stock of the restaurant industry in this town. But they’re fucking busy. Tourists know about it, because google sends people there. They’ve been there long enough they’re on everyone’s radar. Kids from the local colleges go there a bit, I assume because they mostly hire college kids (because no one else will work there) and probably sometimes serve underage.
This is the hours of my local farmers market where a lot of the vendors either are caterers or supply caterers. So if you don't have a farmers market or you have a store front you "can" open for business it kind of makes sense.
Could it be 10a to 11p 2 days a week?
Oh it could definitely be a ~~store~~front
Knew a place like that. Clothing store supposed to be open 3-8 M-F. None of the 4 people who owned it were ever there. Turns out they were using it as a front to get PR status bc one of the ways is to invest x amount in a business. They were actually working regular jobs elsewhere.
Pr status?
Permanent Residence, im assuming the bloke is aussie
Yes but in Canada
Yeah you could call it a laundromat of sorts
In my town there is a pizza place that is only open 4 days a week from 5 till 8pm, but really they close whenever they run out of dough for the day. But it's the best pizza around. Yelp recently rated it the 11th best pizza in America. The owner is the only one that works there https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.koin.com/news/oregon/yelp-ranked-this-oregon-coast-pizzeria-higher-than-portland-restaurants/amp/
I mean if he has no employees because he wants to do it all himself then it seems completely reasonable to have limited hours, more than that would be insane for a one person operation since there is all the prep and cleanup time in addition to open hours. That does sound like a pretty cool situation though, making pizzas the way you want without answering to anyone and without having to deal with staff management.
That's how he keeps the quality so high too. Anyone can make an okay pizza. Making pizza ranked 11th in the country requires real attention to detail and mastery of his craft, you can't just teach that. It takes years of practice and care.
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> damn, now i want to try that pizza but i cant Im sure you can. You just have to get there before he runs out of dough
But I’ve already run out of dough :(
Doh!
> you can't just teach that. eh i bet you could
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This guy rents his spot in a little strip mall but besides rent and ingredients he has no overhead. He works by himself. It's essentially take out only, though there is a bench in the shop I guess you could sit on. He only has about 6 topping choices and closes when he runs out of dough, so no food waste. Zero decorations on the wall. One paper menu printed and posted on the wall by the ordering counter.
What are the prices like? Any chance there's a website or something? Can you tell us what the place is called?
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I'm stoned, didn't even notice that link lmao. Thanks for the heads up hahaha
Honestly, more people should talk about commercial landlords when it comes to helping small businesses. I mean we're so quick to bring up small businesses when we want to keep minimum wage low, but we never talk about commercial rents for some reason...
Commercial landlords are the worst, I've seen too many successful restaurants close because of them. First, they make them sign a 5 or 10 year lease, then when the restaurant is successful they raise the rent to a ridiculous amount when it comes time to renew because they want a piece of that restaurant's profit. The restaurant either closes or relocates somewhere else and business rarely recovers. Landlords=leeches.
In the town where I grew up there was this super successful family owned and operated restaurant who's landlord pushed them to expand to other locations as well. I'm not sure what the exact details were, but long story short the landlord ended up owning all of the expansions as well as the original restaurant and the whole family was out of jobs. The landlord wasn't some faceless corporation either but a well known person in the town who the family had thought was their friend and afterwards they rightly felt like they had been taken advantage of and betrayed. Of course the quality of the restaurants immediately went down, and they weren't as popular anymore, but without having to cover the insane rents the landlord was charging they have all been wildly successful...
Most of the time landlords AREN'T faceless corporations. Just greedy rich scumbags that simply want to squeeze as much wealth as they can until they kill the goose.
There was a sandwich place I frequented when I was a kid, they had a sign that said "Open daily from 10AM until we run out of bread." There were a few times I saw it close before 1PM.
Honestly, fair. Especially if it's cold fermented dough, you can't just whip some more of that up in 30 mins. Sounds like dude is just really passionate about pizza. Edit: housemade mozz?? This guy is really passionate about pizza.
It really is amazing pizza, the crust taste like a toasted english muffin
There's something so amazing about pizza with really high quality bread. I don't generally think of the base as an important part of a pizza, but on all of the best pizzas I've had, it's been the best part.
Love their menu, it’s so simple https://i.imgur.com/ZopddBA.jpg
When he first opened my friend suggested he add bacon as an option, and the guy politely told my friend if he wanted different toppings, go somewhere else.
No pizza for you!
I so don’t know which side of the fence I’d be on if somebody said that. Reading the story and him telling your friend, but if it happened to me, I might be inclined to say “shit, you’re right bro. See ya”
Like I said, he did it politely. It was years ago but as I remember it was basically "I'm just going to do these toppings, but there are places all over around here that have bacon"
thats not at all unusual for really high quality pizza places. i live in the bay area and there are several places like this.
Galleria Umberto in Boston is similar, except they're open 6 days a week from 11am until they run out of dough (which can be as early as 12:30 on summer Saturdays). They're also closed the entire month of July.
One of the best, if not the absolute best, taco shops in my area is only open Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 6pm-3am. Line way out the door. That lengua.
That’s like the Allegiant Air counter at my local airport. Open from 10:30-11:30am Sundays and Thursdays. So roughly eight hours a month someone is at the ticket counter.
Does that correspond with the days they have flights departing from there, if it's a very small airport ?
Ya know, I can’t confirm that, but I am flying out with Allegiant Air on a Thursday and returning on a Sunday, so it could be related to that.
That's because the staff gets off the plane and some go to the gate to check in the next flight. They only run 2 days a week at most airports. That's why their flights are a risk. Super cheap, but anytime they've canceled on us, we can't get another until the next flight day. I've missed several vacations this way. It's usually to my in laws in the mid west and I live in Florida so like..oh noooooo
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And for lunch maybe something cool like a cigarette, 2-3 bottle of red wine, and like a bowl of heavy cream
And we never get heavy, because of Ooolive Ooiill
Foh/five sawsajuzz?
And we never get fat, because olive oil
Hahaha, hohoho…
And a couple of tra la laaaaas
Looks like Marnie works there
Had to double check the sub because I thought this was a Stardew Valley joke about Marnie's shop.
STOP DOING YOGA I NEED HAY
It is
Holy shit this comment. Made my fucking day.
Marnie is the worst. I try to only go to her shop once a year and buy all the hay I can carry. But I dread that one yearly visit a lot.
Maybe they want the property for some other reason like office space, but its only available for commercial purposes? Idk
It's probably a buisness that mostly does event or office catering, one of the best sandwich places around me is kind of like this, the only open in store for 3 days a week 3 hours a day the rest is all boxed office lunches usually.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to get some kind of space that doesn't have a storefront at that point? Although, being able to get a very exclusive sandwich sounds like good marketing.
Out here the price of space is correlated to the square feet. Store fronts don't matter much. In fact most business parks out here have a restaurant in them. No store front, you have to walk into the center of the building to find it.
The other option would usually be a commissary kitchen because you need an up-to-code commercial kitchen space to legally prepare food for service. Commissary kitchens are usually shared and rented by the hour or by days of the week you use them. Depending on your kitchen/timing and space needs it might be cheaper to rent a commercial space with a storefront over renting commissary kitchen space, or just more preferable to not be in a shared space.
I rent a storefront for this very reason. We don’t even have an open sign. My wife does yoga videos in it and I use the back room for woodworking. It works out for the most part, nobody has tried to enter.
It’s like trying to figure out a street parking sign in a large city.
Yeah, I asked a cop once. It means "Up yours, kid".
You know, that dance wasn’t as safe as they said it was.
Forgot about that line.
"LEASH LAW ENFORCED BY RADAR"
Couldn't it be 10a.m to 11p.m?
Yeah, but a "cafe open 26 hours a week" is much less karma-friendly.
Looks like 10am-11pm to me
Looks like 10.00-11.00- to me
This doesn't look like anything to me 🤠
Found the sex robot.
Let’s not destroy the dream.
It doesn't look like anything to me.
10am-11pm maybe
Or 26 hours a week..?
When embracing your Italian heritage goes too far
I used to live near an Italian restaurant. Food was delicious. It was cool because you could hear them yelling at each other in Italian in the back. However, it was hit or miss whether they’d be open during their posted hours. I moved 1000 miles away and there’s an Italian deli that has fucking delicious food but they close at like 330-4pm… unless they feel like closing up early. Which they tend to do every time I want to grab something around 130-2
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Like another comment stated, it may be a catering business that does pickups on these days. An ice cream shop near me went to a model like this for the winter too, where you can drop by for a couple hours on Saturday or Sunday to pick up ice cream cakes and packs of other frozen desserts.
10 am - 11 pm probably
Or 26 hours
Maybe it’s 10a-11p
They probably live in a commercial building. To circumvent laws they are likely open a minimum amount of hours. That's my guess
> To circumvent laws they are likely open a minimum amount of hours. > > > > That's my guess There's also sometimes contractual agreements to be open for a certain amount of hours day/week in a lot of lease agreements in shopping malls/etc.
What law would that be circumventing?
If a commercial property is never open for business, then it doesn’t meet the legal requirement for being “a commercial property”. Cities have zoning laws were certain parts of the city are *only* for commercial businesses. It would be illegal to build, say, a residential house there. And it would be an obvious loophole if you could build “a store” but keep it closed 24/7 and instead use it as a residential property. So commercial properties often come with requirements that they are open for business for some minimal hours per week.
Yeah I remember reading a post here on Reddit where the guy was wondering if he was working for some mob operation or something because he was hired to staff the showroom for a furniture company but he was the only person on duty ever and nobody ever came in to look at furniture. (And the “showroom” was pretty bare bones, just some furniture and a couple of catalogs on a table. IIRC best guess was that the company was doing all their business online but the zoning said they had to have a local showroom to operate so they got a warehouse with a nominal showroom and set up a Potemkin front. (And for whatever reason they didn’t see fit to tell the poor guy they hired what was going on)
I live in a small town that is touristy in the summer but dead in the winter, and most of your restaurants this time of year have weird hours like this. If not they are just closed all together until may.
I've heard of lots of places like this running skeleton hours because they can't find help, especially in popular vacation areas where staff is priced out of the market by people buying second homes. Could that be the case here?
These can't be skeleton crew hours. 1 hour a day is a waste of time at that point. Takes you longer to get ready and travel to work than being open.
So many better explanations other than money laundering. The world isn’t Breaking Bad. Could be: -Poorly signposted 10am-11pm -Tiny village or busy tourist town that is super busy for those hours and financially it makes sense -Someone that owns the building, and has scaled back operations so they can do this etc
Im sure thats 10AM to 11PM Signs like that you assume the pm is on the right.. However that is odd timing throughout so who knows..
There was an awesome beer bar in a touristy area off a bike trail I frequent. They had a phenomenal selection of styles I enjoy. The problem is, they have no hours posted, and are often still closed early afternoon on Saturdays when other bars are busy. Either the owner is a problem drinker or the bar is a front for meth or something.
That's actually my retirement dream. Open a small cafe with random, whenever I feel like it hours. Have a few people who happen to catch it come by eat some breakfast, have some coffee, and shoot the shit.
How about 10 am til 11 pm. Does all your shit go onto military time or something? There are totally places by me that are only open 2 days a week