Malls can ask retailers to open their stores at all scheduled times, but many just aren’t able to do so.
Nancy Roger runs a collector’s shop on the Carrefour Charlesbourg with her two boys and is saddened that the vast majority of dealers close their doors between 6pm and 7pm on Thursday and Friday evenings.
“We have to be five or six to open by 9pm. When customers come, it’s not so attractive. But what is happening is understandable,” says the co-owner of CKB Collections.
Since she hasn’t found an employee to entrust her valuables to, she shares the long working hours as a family. Meals are taken at the back of the store when there aren’t too many customers. This is everyday life for those who work alone in their business.
A desired rest day
Nancy Roger wants our company to decide to close stores one day a week so retailers can breathe a little. Sometimes he closes on Mondays to rest because seven days a week is a lot. But it’s not easy to break the rules.
“Since COVID, mall managers no longer issue fines when we close. You know it’s difficult. They don’t love it, but they tolerate it,” says the woman who opened her shop in 2019, just months before the pandemic began.
No fines in sight…
At the Galeries de la Capitale, where official opening hours last until 9pm every night of the week, a store manager said she was baffled by this extended schedule.
There, too, the fines for defaulting merchants seem to have disappeared. Several premises have been vacant since the pandemic and fears of further closures are certainly present. The management of the galleries did not respond to our interview request.
The risk of losing customers
Photo courtesy of Groupe Boucher Sports
Martin Boucher
Group CEO
butcher sports
The situation is making some retailers angry. At the Boucher Sports Group, which has around thirty branches, including several Sports Experts, CEO Martin Boucher finds the irregularities increasingly ridiculous. He says he saw several stores closed until 11 a.m. during a busy period in Laurier Quebec on a Saturday morning in February.
“It will be important to create awareness in the industry because if customers show up on a Thursday evening, for example, and every third store is closed, it is possible that they will decide not to come anymore! At some point you have to be ready to do business! exclaims Mr. Boucher.
Walking into closed doors, a mishap that has become very common
It’s 8 p.m. Thursday night, and a couple stumble upon closed doors at Clément’s in the Galeries de la Capitale, one of the largest malls in Greater Quebec.
Photo by Valerie Lesage
Graziella and Mateus Silveira were very disappointed when they found Clément’s closed doors on a Thursday night.
“That’s why we left the house. We need clothes for our 15 month old daughter. We are disappointed,” say Graziella and Mateus Silveira.
Luckily they also had an item of clothing to exchange at another store and may not necessarily have been there for free.
More than half a dozen stores were closed well before 9pm when Le Journal visited the premises in early March. And not necessarily the smallest: The Bay, Clarks, Yves Rocher, San Francisco and others.
Photo by Valerie Lesage
The shutters in La Baie in the Galeries de la Capitale are already closed at 8pm on a Thursday.
This scenario is repeated almost everywhere in Quebec and the consumer is confused.
“There are closed doors everywhere in Saint-Georges,” says Steve Blais, who came to Quebec City to shop and was annoyed by the unpredictability.
Another customer, disappointed with the limited supply, thought she would buy online next time or go to another mall.
Given the unpredictability
It becomes very difficult to know what is open and what is not. We can no longer rely on the timetables advertised by a mall as not everyone follows them. If we search for a specific store on the Internet, we can still come across a spontaneous closure because the only scheduled employee is ill and no one can replace him. A situation that seemed unthinkable before the pandemic.
Photo The newspaper
This cleaning company on Laurier Street in Montreal is now closing three days a week.
In the Galeries de la Capitale, a Doucet jewelry store is said to be closed on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Another sign in the door announced that, exceptionally, it could not be opened on Thursday morning due to a lack of staff.
Likewise in restaurants.
Elsewhere, a Mc Donald’s dining room, which used to be open from 6am to 10pm, is now only accessible from 8am to 9pm, while the drive-thru, which was offered 24 hours a day, takes off at 9pm to restart just at 6am or 7am depending on the day.
Along the Autoroute de la Capitale, a Burger King has closed its dining room all the time and only offers a drive-through service from Monday to Saturday between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.
In a recent interview with Le Journal, the president of La Cage Brasserie sportive said that the way you go to a restaurant has completely changed since the pandemic.
“Before, we asked ourselves whether we wanted to eat Asian cuisine or burgers, and then we decided on the restaurant. Now we look at what is open and choose from it,” notes Jean Bédard.
Deficit of 52,000 employees in restaurants and shops
It would miss 25,000 retail workers and 27,000 restaurant workers for the two sectors to return to their pre-pandemic schedules.
“We no longer have a seven-day week dynamic in the catering trade, but often four days a week and there are many companies that no longer offer evening meals due to a lack of staff. There’s traffic, but it’s concentrated. Would we have more people if we were open more often? It’s hard to say, but it’s clear we’re keeping the sale on the table,” said Martin Vézina, vice president of public and government affairs at Association Restoration Québec (ARQ).
Whether in Montreal, Quebec or the regions, few restaurants are open for dinner early in the week. So much so that in some places communities have taken initiatives to avoid starving tourists or truck drivers.
“I know that the operators in La Malbaie and Mont-Tremblant have given themselves a timetable to ensure a permanent catering service and not to close everything at the same time,” says Mr. Vézina.
Difficult recruitment
With an unemployment rate of 2.4% in Quebec last January, near an all-time low, it is very difficult to rebuild teams in the restaurant business, a sector that has lost many employees due to successive closures during the pandemic.
“We are recruiting overseas and as we have new staff to support, we are looking at the time windows we can open again. Our goal is to be able to return to normal before the summer,” said Pierre Moreau, CEO of Restos Plaisirs Group, stressing that it is only a year since the end of the health restrictions linked to the pandemic.
There are vacancies everywhere in gastronomy or fast food. Average salaries have risen by 21% in the last three years, but ARQ believes there is now a need to make tip redistribution mandatory to make working conditions for kitchen staff more attractive.
The pandemic has resulted in the closure of 3,250 restaurants in Quebec, a 15% drop in supply.
Quebecers are reluctant to restrict opening hours
Concerned about retailers’ difficulty in covering all opening hours for a week, the Quebec Retail Trade Council (CQCD) polled the population about possible restrictions.
The survey conducted by ORAMA Marketing in early February shows that Quebecers are not enthusiastic about the idea of giving retailers a day off. Only four out of ten consumers are in favor of closing shops on Sundays. The idea of taking Mondays off is even less popular, with only 29% of respondents in favor of it.
These percentages exclude petrol stations, as in this sub-sector the status quo is almost unanimously wanted by consumers.
Sunday taken for granted
From the summer of 1990, shops were allowed to open on Sundays.
The file had sparked several debates at the time and initially only grocery stores were allowed to open. Two years later, the law was extended to other companies, and Quebecers seem keen on the achievement ever since.
Customization requested
The CQCD has also surveyed retailers, and most of them want variable measures based on location and type of store, rather than coming to a mandatory closing day.
For Damien Silès, General Manager of the CQCD, the question of opening hours is undeniable and the necessary consideration in the context of labor shortages.
“It seemed imperative to us to take the pulse of retailers and consumers alike to build dialogue and achieve better consistency for everyone,” he said in a press release this week.
So the discussion begins, but the gap between consumers’ need for predictability and the desire for solutions that can be freely adapted to the location and business seems large.