Good lord, it's closing time!

[protege]

Last minute customers who want a service which takes time ... ergh.

Sometimes though, they might not have a choice. I remember once when my car was having issues while I was driving home from work. All of a sudden, it was down on power and running very rough. Bad weather meant that I wasn't about to drive to the Mazda dealer--10 miles the other way--so I had no choice but to reach the nearest garage. By the time I got there, the car was only running on 3 cylinders, and it was about 20 minutes before closing. By then, most of the mechanics had finished, and were starting to clean up the service area. I'm sure they were a tad annoyed about having to fix my damn car, but they did it. They got it running again in about 10 minutes. Turns out that one of the spark plug wires had split...letting moisture in, and shorting things against the block. Anyway, since the repair only cost me about $20 and they'd taken care of it so quickly (and screwed with closing their department) I slipped them an extra $25, and told them to get some pizzas.

[Jetfire]

I'm sure most mechanics (and most people in general) can recognize the difference from a person having a legit emergency, or near emergency, as opposed to the "I'm coming in at the last minute and DEMANDING you serve me because I'm special and you're dirt" type of person. The former, they might be a bit annoyed with having to handle, but will usually try to help out with a legit smile. The later will be treated with dirt/the bare minimum, if they can't just push them off to another day or another site.

My own story is about 15 years old now. I was driving back to Ottawa after spending Easter with my family in NB. I owned a car and had just had the summer tires put back on. While on the highway through Quebec, one of the tires blew out and I barely made it to the side of the road. Since I had been in the fast lane at the time, I had to pull off to the left hand side of the road, so I had extra fast traffic going by me.

Within 5-10 minutes, some nice guys from Services Quebec (or whoever monitors the highways) showed up and helped me get the spare put on thankfully. I immediately drove to the nearest Canadian Tire (in Montmagny IIRC) to get two new summer tires. It was around 4-4:30 on a Saturday, and in that area of Quebec, everything's closing at 5 basically. But the guys at that CT helped me out right away, (even with my pidgen French language skills), took the car right in and swapped two new Summers on and helped me on my way. (I could probably have made it back to Ottawa on the spare easily; but at that point I needed/wanted the new tires just to regain my trust basically)

Kudos to all those folks for helping me out that day.

[BearLeeBadenaugh]

It's been a while since I've had what I'd term a regular retail store. We do some material sales via the landscaping company, but we don't stock a showroom or anything like that.

I've always thought that when/if I ever do need to have a storefront I was going add a special line with the biz hours, something along the lines of "We close promptly at X:XX, there will be a $10 service charge for any purchase not completed by X:X5"

$10 might not be enough, might have to make it per employee per hour. Otherwise might get Mr Entitled demanding we stay an hour and serve him.