Open earlier or stay open later: which two hours earn more?

Put the two hours at the end that brings you cash, not the end that brings the biggest sales. The morning end usually earns less on paper and more in the galla. Test both ends on your own street for four weeks before you settle it for good.

The two hours you already have

You are in the shop twelve hours as it is. The shutter goes up at eight, it comes down at eight, and somewhere in the middle you eat standing at the counter. So the question is not whether you should work more. You settled that long ago. The question is where the same two hours are worth the most.

Two hours at the front of the day and two hours at the back cost you exactly the same in time. They cost you nothing alike in anything else. One takes sleep. One takes the evening with your family. One fills the galla with notes. One fills the khata with names.

Ask anyone on your street and he will say the night is busier. He is usually right, and that is precisely why the question is worth sitting with, because busier and better are not the same word.

What follows is a method, not an opinion. Run it on your own shop with numbers you can start writing tonight.

What the early end actually brings

Open at seven instead of nine and the first thing that changes is not the customers. It is the work.

The delivery van comes early, because that is when it is on the road. The supplier who says he cannot hold your crate until noon can easily hold it until half past seven. If you fetch your own stock from the wholesale market, that trip stops eating shop hours, because you are back and open before the first real rush. Every hour of stock work you shift into the morning is an hour you do not lose in the middle of the day, standing over cartons while a customer waits.

Then the customers arrive, and they are a particular kind of customer.

At ten past seven a man in his work clothes walks in with a bike helmet still in his hand. Bread, eggs, a packet of tea, a phone card. He does not browse, he does not ask you to bring the rate down, and he does not ask you to look up what he owes. He hands over a note, takes the bag, and is out in ninety seconds.

Fewer people come through the door in those two hours. That is true on nearly every street. But the basket is often bigger, the sale is faster, and the money is real money. A man who is late for work does not stop to argue about a balance, and he does not want a line written against his name that he will have to explain at the end of the month.

What the night end actually brings

The other end is the opposite in almost every way, starting with the crowd.

The street fills up after work. Men come home, children are sent out for the one thing the house has run out of, and the shop still open at half past nine catches all of it. If you counted heads instead of rupees, the last two hours would beat the first two on most streets without a contest.

At twenty to ten a man in a work shirt puts down a packet of sugar, half a kilo of onions and two eggs. While you are bagging it he tells you the transformer in his lane has gone again. It is a Rs 240 sale, it takes six minutes, and eleven more people will come in exactly like that before you pull the shutter.

Then the part that quietly decides the whole question. The last two hours carry the highest share of udhaar in the day, and not by a little. The man with money in his pocket spends it earlier. The man with none comes late, when the shop is quieter, when he can say the sentence without three neighbours standing behind him listening. Night is when your ledger grows.

That does not make the night end bad. A real share of your turnover lives there, and a customer you turn away at night buys somewhere else in the morning. But write down what you took and what you wrote against names, hour by hour, and the shape shows up fast. The argument behind that shape is worked through in cash only or udhaar: which shop earns more.

Side by side, and the number that decides it

Put the two ends on one page and the choice stops being about which one feels busier.

The same two hours, at the two ends of the day

Two hours at the morning endTwo hours at the night end

People through the doorTwo hours at the morning endFewer, and they come in onesTwo hours at the night endThe heaviest crowd of the day

What they buyTwo hours at the morning endA short list, bought in a hurryTwo hours at the night endOne or two small things at a time

How they payTwo hours at the morning endCash, nearly all of itTwo hours at the night endThe highest udhaar share of the day

Time you spend on one customerTwo hours at the morning endNinety seconds and he is goneTwo hours at the night endSix minutes, and half of it is talk

Shop work you can finishTwo hours at the morning endDeliveries, the wholesale trip, counting stockTwo hours at the night endAlmost none, the counter never clears

What it takes out of your own lifeTwo hours at the morning endSleep, and the energy you need laterTwo hours at the night endThe evening with your family

The day's money when you closeTwo hours at the morning endCounted and put away before the rushTwo hours at the night endCarried home in the dark

Safe to hand to a helperTwo hours at the morning endYes, it is mostly lists and cashTwo hours at the night endNo, this is the hour credit is decided

Read the last three rows slowly, because those are the ones nobody prices. The early end is paid for with sleep, and sleep is not free. If you open at seven and the street's real rush comes at six in the evening, you may reach that rush already finished. Two hours gained at dawn and one hour lost at the busiest hour of the day is a bad trade, and easy to make without noticing, because tiredness never shows up as a number in your accounts.

The night end is paid for with your family, and that bill arrives late. It is also the end that puts you on the road after dark carrying the whole day's takings. Anyone who has done it knows the feeling of walking home with a full pocket down a lane with two lights out.

Both ends also burn light, fans and a helper's pay. An hour that sells Rs 900 of goods at a thin margin may not cover the cost of keeping the shutter up at all, which is the sum laid out in how much your shop must sell before you earn.

Now the number itself. It is easy to compare the two ends on sales, because sales are what you already know. It is also the wrong number.

Say you can give the shop two more hours

Morning end: sold in the two hoursRs 3,000

Morning end: your margin on thatRs 360

Morning end: cash in the gallaRs 3,000

Night end: sold in the two hoursRs 6,000

Night end: your margin on thatRs 720

Night end: written on khata, not paidRs 3,300

Night end: cash in the gallaRs 2,700

What the night end really gives youRs 360 more margin, Rs 300 less cash

Made-up figures at a margin of 12 in every 100. Put in your own takings and your own udhaar share and the answer can turn over completely.

Look at what that scenario really says. The night end earns Rs 360 more and hands you Rs 300 less to pay the supplier with tomorrow. If your shop is comfortable on cash, that is a good swap, because the extra margin is real and it comes back over the following weeks. If you are already juggling which supplier gets paid on which day, it is a terrible swap, because you cannot pay a bill with a name in a ledger.

That is the whole comparison in one line. A shop short of cash should buy cash. A shop that has cash should buy margin. Work out your own margin first, using how to work out your shop's real profit, or you are multiplying by a guess.

How to measure it on your own street

None of this needs a special register. It needs two numbers per band instead of one number per day.

Four weeks that settle the question

1. 1Cut your day into two-hour bandsWrite the bands down the side of one page: 7 to 9, 9 to 11, and so on to closing.
2. 2Write two numbers for every band, every dayWhat was sold in that band, and how much of it went on khata instead of into the galla.
3. 3Run the early end for two full weeksThe same opening time every day, no exceptions, or the street never learns your hours.
4. 4Run the late end for the next two weeksThe same closing time every day, and keep writing the same two numbers.
5. 5Compare margin per hour and cash per hourMultiply each band's sales by your own margin, take out what was not paid, and read the two totals side by side.

The reason for two full weeks at each end is habit. Customers learn your hours slowly, over many repeats, and the first few days of a new opening time show you almost nothing. A stretch that begins on a quiet run of days and ends on a heavy one is not evidence either, so keep the same number of days and the same days of the week on both sides.

Write the udhaar column even when it looks obvious. That column is the one that surprises people. Shopkeepers doing this for the first time usually find one band carrying most of the credit they give, and it is rarely the band they would have guessed. Once you can see it, you can decide whether to keep that band, staff it differently, or hold a firmer line on credit inside it.

If two numbers per band feel like extra work, it is because your daily count is being done from memory. A shop where the day is written as it happens gives you this measurement for free, for the reasons set out in why your cash box never matches your khata.

What the answer usually turns out to be

No rule fits every shop, but there are patterns worth checking yours against.

A kirana on a residential lane usually earns more at the night end, because that street has no morning traffic to speak of. Everyone is indoors until eight. If that is you, the morning is a stock hour rather than a selling hour, and it may still be worth opening early to take deliveries and clear the counting, without expecting sales from it.

A shop on a road people travel down on their way to work is the opposite case, and often the clearest win of all. Those two hours are pure cash from people who cannot stop for long. If you sit on such a road and open at nine, you are handing that trade to whoever opens at seven.

A shop inside a market that opens and closes together has less freedom than it looks. Opening before the market wakes up is dead time, because customers come for the market, not for you. Only the late end moves there, and even then only if two or three shops around you stay open so the row still looks alive.

A shop whose customers are daily-wage workers has its own shape. They are paid in the evening, so evening is when they can settle what they owe. Closing early on such a street does not only cost you sales, it costs you collections, and that is the more expensive of the two.

Neither end, a helper, and holding the hours you choose

There is a third answer almost nobody weighs, and for some shops it beats both.

Do neither. Close the dead middle hours instead. If your bands show a stretch that barely covers the light it burns, shutting for it and moving those hours somewhere useful is a real option. But the warning is easy to underestimate. A customer who finds you shut twice stops checking. He does not complain and he does not ask when you are open. He simply goes to the shop that is always there, and you never learn that you lost him. A split day works only if it is exactly the same split every day, written up where people can read it.

The staffing version changes the arithmetic completely. If a helper covers one end, that hour no longer costs you sleep or your evening, it costs you a wage, and the sum becomes simple: does the end earn more margin than the wage it burns? Which end you hand over is not free either. Give away the early end. It is deliveries, counting and cash sales, all checkable against a list, and mistakes there surface the same day. Never give away the night end. That is the hour credit decisions are made, the hour a customer pushes for udhaar he should not get, and the hour the day's money is counted. Whether a helper pays for himself at all is worked through in hire a helper or run the shop alone.

Whatever you settle on, hold it. Your customers memorise your hours without being told, and every change makes them learn you again. Swinging back and forth every few weeks costs more than either option earns, so run the test once, decide, and stay put.

Wasoolo stores every khata entry and every payment with its own date and time, so splitting a day into bands is a matter of reading back what is already saved rather than keeping a second notebook. Its reports show a whole stretch of days in one place, which is what you want when you are comparing four weeks against each other.

Common questions

My street is completely dead before nine. Is there any point opening early at all?

There can be, but not for selling. Treat those hours as work hours. Take deliveries then, count stock, do the wholesale run, price new goods and clean the shelves. You keep the whole selling day clear of that work, which is worth real money even if the counter stays quiet. Judge those hours on what they free up later, never on their sales.

If the night hours bring the most udhaar, should I stop giving credit at night?

Refusing everyone at one time of day is a rule your regulars will read as an insult. Set a limit instead. Decide before the evening starts how much new credit you are willing to write, and which customers are past their limit already. Say no to those quietly, and keep serving the rest. The problem is not evening credit, it is unchecked credit.

I cannot test both ends. How long is long enough for one of them?

Two full weeks at minimum, and four is better. Anything shorter measures the weather and your own mood rather than the street. Customers need many repeats before they believe a new opening time, so the first week of any change under-reports what that hour can really do. If you can test only one end, test the one you are more likely to keep.

Is it safe to keep the shop open on my own after dark?

That is a question about your lane, not about business. If you do stay open late, plan the money rather than the courage. Move the bulk of the takings out of the shop before the last hour, keep a small float in the galla, and vary the route and time you go home. If the answer still makes you uneasy, the early end is the safer two hours.

Everyone on my row opens and closes together. Can I really break the pattern?

At the morning end, yes, and more easily than at the night end. Opening early makes you the only choice for anyone out at that time, and it costs the others nothing, so it rarely causes friction. Staying open alone at night is harder, because a row of closed shutters makes a street look shut and people stop walking down it.

What if the test says the two ends are almost equal?

Then the money has stopped deciding and everything else should. Take the end that costs you less at home, the end that is safer to walk back from, and the end you can hand to a helper later without worry. Where the rupees tie, that is usually the morning, and it leaves your evenings alone as well.