SmallBusinessNewz

Over Memorial Day Weekend, I went to visit my grandparents in a small Ohio town and in this town there is a single video store.

You would think that the store would thrive being the only one in town, but I go there just about every time I visit the town and it is always so slow you can almost see tumbleweeds roll by. That is when it is actually open. The store has the most unusual hours I have ever encountered for any business, let alone a video store. In fact, I don't believe their hours are even posted on their door for customers to see.

Of course, they face competition from online rental companies like Netflix, but there is no other brick and mortar store in this town offering what they offer. Despite the growing popularity of the online services, many people still go to stores to rent their movies. This store should be making a killing "dominating the niche".

It's a small town, but it's not tiny. There are plenty of people there who would rent movies from this place, but they probably never know when it will be open. And not only are the customers missing out on movie rentals, the business is surely missing out on a good amount of money.

My grandparents tell me that they tried to rent a couple movies there in the early afternoon on New Year's Eve. They drove to the store and it was closed. Had they been open, they probably would've gotten even more business than on a typical day. Even if they wanted to close early for the holiday, they should not have been closed the entire day.

I have tried to go in the store on a random non-holiday weekday as well, in the mid-afternoon and they were closed. There was no sign indicating why, just a "closed" sign.

This seems highly irregular and like an obviously poor business practice, but it got me thinking. Is this more common than I realize? Are there a lot of small businesses out there operating this way with no set schedule of business hours?

I wouldn't think that any store that is open to the public would last very long this way, but this video store has been around for years. Something tells me that it won't for much longer as the aforementioned online services continue to grow even more in popularity, but they've managed to survive this long.

Are any of you out there running a business this way with any level of success? I'm not here to judge, I'm just truly curious.