#thus i did my taxes at 10pm

[thinkinpoink]

Guess who finally did their taxes!!!!

[nickgerlich]

Twenty-Four Hours To Go

I remember the first time I was exposed to a 24-hour diner. I was at university in Indiana, doing my undergrad. It was also about the same time I became friends with coffee. We’re still good friends.

My dorm mates and I would pile into someone’s car and head to the nearby Waffle House. Now that’s not the familiar Waffle Houses across the southland. No, this was an entirely different Indiana chain more akin to Denny’s. They welcomed us, if only to make the place look more crowded after midnight. Never the mind the fact that we weren’t spending much, and tipping even less.

I was probably exposed to this genre before university, but those kinds of things weren’t important to kids back then. But I fell in love with the notion, and found that I became energized about 1am. Bring on the lists to memorize, my caffeinated soul was ready to do some power studying.

After I moved downstate to Bloomington for grad school, it was newsworthy when the new Kroger store announced they were going to be open 24/7. This was great news for someone who doesn’t like crowds of shoppers. It’s almost Zen-like shopping at 3am, observing all the other zombie-eyed shoppers pushing their trolleys along.

I was hooked, and praise God, Walmart embraced the concept as well. There are 168 hours in the week, and I could pick any one of them to go shopping. That is, until everything came to a screeching halt in March 2020. I need not say more.

With practically everything shut down—depending on your state and locale, of course—the thought of being open eight hours, much less 24 hours, became moot. Curbside was a best-case scenario, if you were able to pivot to new ways of doing old things.

But once the pandemic subsided, and our hunger to return to the old normal began being sated, stores and restaurants were slow to return to 24/7. Even today, there are many businesses that not only have been reluctant to do so, but also have flat out decided they’re not going back.

And it signals what may well be a permanent scar, one among many inflicted by COVID. Consumer behaviors have changed. Available labor has declined. Costs of doing business have increased. It’s the perfect storm for an imperfect situation.

It’s sad, too, because a business that is closed thus has un-performing assets whenever the lights are out and the doors locked. It’s not as bad as it is for churches, many of whom are open for “business” only a few hours on one day of the week. You pay for the whole building as it stands, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The same goes for real estate taxes and utilities. If you’re not making money, you’re losing it, and the bills go on.

Among the consumer changes are a desire to eat earlier, eat out less, drink less, and not stay out late doing the things we once did. That doesn’t mean we have given up on sporting events, movies, and concerts, though. It just means we do those things less, effectively accepting a little shorter leash on life. COVID taught us to get by on a lot less, and with inflation still among us, we are able to handle it better because we’ve already been down an austere path.

We also learned that we can order online a lot more than what we did pre-COVID. Delivery, whether by courier or third-party driver, became a new normal. Groceries on our doorstep meant that we didn’t have to go at all, even if we rather liked those nocturnal missions. Everything else also on our doorstep meant that all that “shopping-in-our-pajamas” we thought we were doing a lot in the olden days was multiplied many fold.

Maybe I am just getting older, too. While I am not yet one of those home-before-dark senior citizens, I do know that if I am up after 10pm, I am living large. As much as I liked grocery shopping after midnight (there’s an ear worm for those of you who know that old song), I am good with doing it in the afternoon these days.

While some chains, like the southern Waffle House, have returned to full 24/7 operations, others are nowhere near what they once did. I suspect that those days are gone forever, with the realization that maybe—just maybe—we were trying to do too much, even though the alternative is to mourn the hours not spent earning revenues.

Besides, we could all use a little more sleep, and removing the temptation to be out and about may be a gift in disguise. And you can still shop Amazon. You may very well have it on your doorstep by noon tomorrow.

Dr “I’m Good With 15/7” Gerlich

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