Holiday hours for a cafe and the week they cost you

Getting found 7 min read

Holiday hours are the ones nobody sets in advance, and the quiet week after Christmas is where it shows. Here is the year's list, written once and set early.

It is the twenty-seventh of December. Somebody who has been shut indoors with family for three days walks ten minutes to your door, in the cold, and finds it dark.

They will get a coffee somewhere. What costs you is the two weeks afterwards, when they have no particular reason to try your door again.

The closing is not the expensive part, the reopening is

Everybody remembers to close. The shutters come down and the sign goes up.

What gets missed is telling people when you are open again. A person who found you dark once has no way of knowing whether you are back on the second, the fifth, or at all, and nobody walks the same wasted ten minutes twice out of loyalty.

So the message is never we are closed. It is closed from the twenty-fourth, open again on the second, normal hours from then. The second half is the half that brings anybody back.

Write the year's list in one sitting

Holiday hours go wrong because they are decided one at a time, in the week of, by somebody who is already busy.

Sit down once, with a calendar, and write out every date you already know you will be shut or short this year. Thanksgiving and the day after. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, the days between. New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Independence Day. The Monday holidays. Easter, if you close for it. The week you take off in the summer. The day your street is closed for something and the day after, when nobody can park.

Twenty minutes gets you the whole year. Put reminders in a calendar two weeks ahead of each one, because a decision made in January is useless if it surfaces on the morning.

Set the special hours early, not on the day

Your listing has a place for hours on a specific date, separate from your normal weekly hours. That is the field that does the work for a day or a few days, and it can be filled in months ahead. A longer shutdown needs the other setting, which is the next section.

On the morning itself you are making coffee, and the edit that has to happen at half past six is the edit that does not happen. Entered in advance, it takes effect on its own, and somebody searching two days before sees the right thing without you touching anything.

If the special hours are missing, a listing tends to show your ordinary hours with a note warning that they may differ, which is the worst of both answers. It does not tell somebody to come and it does not tell them to stay home.

Closing for a week is a different setting from closing on a Tuesday

Two tools get confused here, and Google draws the line by counting days. Special hours cover a closure of up to six days in a row and release on their own. From seven days in a row upwards, Google asks you to use temporarily closed instead.

So a public holiday, a long weekend, or Thanksgiving and the day after are special hours. Two weeks in the summer is temporarily closed, and so is a Christmas shutdown that runs from the twenty-fourth to the second, because that is nine days.

The catch is that temporarily closed does not expire on its own, the way special hours do. Put the reopening date in the same calendar reminder as the closure and take the flag off the morning you open. It needs a reminder, and it is still the right setting for a long closure.

The kitchen closes before the door does

This is the cafe version of the same problem, and it happens on ordinary days too.

The listing says you are open until four. The kitchen stops hot food at two. Somebody arrives at half past two wanting lunch and gets a pastry and a mild sense of having been misled, which is a poor way to meet a new customer.

Say it in one line where the hours are. Kitchen until two, coffee and pastries until four. On holidays the split gets wider, because you might open short-handed with no cooked food at all. That line is worth writing for the holiday too, and it is more valuable than the hours themselves.

The sign on the door only reaches the people already there

A handwritten note taped to the glass is honest, and it reaches exactly the customers who already made the walk.

Everybody else is on a phone somewhere warm, and the sign does not exist for them. The same message has to go where they are looking: the hours on your listing, a short line at the top of your website, and the voicemail if you have a phone anybody calls.

None of those take long. What takes long is that they are three different places with three different logins, so the useful thing to build once is a note of where they all are and who can get into each.

Snow, a broken machine, and the day you close at eleven

Some closures cannot be planned. A grinder dies, the water goes off, the snow comes in overnight and nobody can get down the hill.

The only thing that helps is speed, and speed comes from having done it once before. Know how to change today's hours on your listing from a phone in under two minutes, and how to get one line onto the top of your website. Have a second person who can do both, because the day you are snowed in is the day you are not thinking about the internet.

And be realistic. Some mornings you will not get to it. That is a reason to make the notice quick rather than a reason to feel bad about a morning that was already going badly.

Take the notice down, and put the hours back

The last step is the one that gets skipped, because by then the crisis is over.

A closed until the second notice still sitting on your home page in March tells people you are shut. A special hours entry left in place can keep a listing looking closed on a day you are trading, and a temporarily closed flag will do it for as long as it sits there.

Put the removal in the same calendar reminder as the closure. One entry, two jobs: set it on the tenth, take it off on the third.

A short checklist

• Every known closure for the year written down in one sitting
• Calendar reminders two weeks before each one
• Special hours entered on the listing well ahead of the date, or temporarily closed if you are shut seven days or more
• The reopening date in every notice, not just the closing date
• Kitchen hours stated separately from door hours
• A line on the website, not only a sign on the door
• A second person who can change today's hours from a phone
• Every notice taken down, the temporarily closed flag switched off, and normal hours restored once you are back

Questions people ask

When should I put my Christmas hours in

Late autumn, in the same sitting as the rest of the year. There is no advantage to waiting, and it is done before the week gets busy.

Should I mark the cafe temporarily closed for a two-week break

Yes. Google's rule is that special hours are for a closure of up to six days in a row, and that anything from seven days upwards should be marked temporarily closed, so two weeks is over the line. The risk is that the flag stays until you remove it. Put the reopening date in a calendar reminder and switch it off before you unlock the door.

What do I do when I have to close early for snow

Change today's hours on your listing from your phone, put one line at the top of the website, and leave it at that. Anything more elaborate will not get done.

Where does the closure notice go on my website

At the very top of the home page, in text, above everything else. Not in a slideshow, not in the footer, and not as a picture, because a picture cannot be read out by a phone.

Is a sign on the door enough

It is enough for the people standing at your door and invisible to everybody else. Put it up last.

What if we open but the kitchen is closed that day

Say both. Open ten until two, drinks and pastries only, no hot food. People plan around a clear limit and resent finding it out at the counter.