Why do Shopping Centres close so early?

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I agree with you. Shops complain they’re losing revenue but won’t adjust their hours. Why are shops open 9-6 when the vast majority of people are at work 9-6? It’s so old fashioned.

In London you do get shops staying open later, and the big shopping centres like Westfield are also open. All these places are busy, there’s clearly a market for it. Everyone I speak to anecdotally would prefer to shop in person rather than online.

Because who the fuck wants to work retail until midnight.

I work retail til 8:30 pm. In Primark. No fucker comes in after 6:30 & are astonished we still open at 7…..

We don't have the culture for it - they don't open late because nobody expects them to be open late so they don't go. Between 6-9 you might get 2 customers mid week, so its not worth paying the staff wages to open. I used to work the late shift on the couple of nights the centre opened, it was routinely dead.

You aren't going to change this now, death of the high street is a self fulfilling cycle. They won't open because nobody comes so you can build the culture of evening shopping so it stays closed so nobody comes etc etc.

I wouldn't take a holiday in Germany, then, you'll be shocked.

I'm from EU and was used to go to the shopping centre in the late afternoon or at night. Where I'm from t's not uncomon for people to grab dinner in the mall, look at some shops then go to the cinema before the mall closes at midnight.

Different culture and all that. But this experience is not universal across all of the EU.

I've found it to be very much like that in Spain. But in Germany and the Netherlands, I've found shops close in the early evening and nightlife is geared more towards pubs/bars/restaurants/clubs (similar to here in the UK).

In fact, in Germany, it's a total mission to find anything that's open on a Sunday.

As far as my local experience goes, there are three shopping "malls" on the outer edges of Glasgow (where I live). Two are open until 9pm on weekdays (Silverburn and Braehead) while the other is open until 10pm on weekdays (The Fort).

Most shops in Glasgow city centre are open until 6pm on Saturday evenings too.

I think that sounds like your local shopping centre. I know my most local ones in Leeds close around 9pm with the exception of Sundays as Sunday Trading laws are compulsory in the UK.

Some argue it’s outdated now and try and campaign to change it but I don’t know if it ever would change

If enough people used the shops in the evening they’d be open, there isn’t the demand. Also, unlike many European countries, our shops don’t shut for three hours in the middle of day.

I mean, "rushing after lunch" and "can't be bothered on Sundays" when there's 6-9 shopping hours each day sounds like a you problem!

Bigger city shopping centres/out of town places close at like 10 or 11, it's small town places that are more likely to close at 6.

One thing I will add is UK shops open earlier and so it only seems like they close earlier too. I notice abroad many places don't open til 10am or even lunchtime, so closing later makes sense.

I do wish we had more non-alcoholic nightlife and activities, but I think with the working hours in the UK and disposable income it's just not that common.

It’s dying because nobody wants to go. They used to open later and have special ‘late nights’ and some still do nearer Christmas but the concept of shopping for more stuff is long gone 

A good propotion of the year beyond 5pm it is dark and cold. We have the culture that after around this time you go home and have your evening meal. Perhaps head to the pub later.

Other countries with better weather do things differently.

Pretty sure the Trafford centre shops close around 9/10

High streets are not shopping centres, high streets are kind of dying everywhere. I agree though that in the UK it's a lot of big retail parks with car parks and a few big shops, less of the covered shopping centres with a bigger variety of smaller places and eating/drinking where you can go and hang out for a while. A retail park is to go and buy something specific.

Probably because it costs more to keep shops open for longer.

Its cultural.

Theres a few generalisations but the trends run true. Essentially its dark for a good part of the year, so we dont do go out after 6 unless its summer. Weve come from a 9-5 work mentality (which applies to retail workers to some degree). Sunday trading laws are a throwback to our religious history. And since online shopping came about, weve pretty much just gone all in with it. We can be quite reclusive, so most people dont generally pursue the social side of shopping, and things like pubs and restaurants aren't linked to shopping activities.

Its isnt any wonder the high street is dying. Everyone likes to blame business rates and rents but the simple truth is weve only got ourselves to blame.

I distinctly remember a moment working at B&Q. Id spent about 20 minutes talking a guy through all the options for available sanders. Essentially recommended the best one for the job. The guy without any hesitation or thought, said thanks, whacked out his phone, went on amazon, saw the price was about £1 cheaper and ordered it there and then. Within 18 months id been made redundant and the store was shut down. Ultimately he valued that £1 more than he valued my advice and the convenience of having a store near him. And this is the norm not the exception. People arent willing to pay more for something they dont immediately see the value of, weve got a very short sighted approach to how we buy things.

The people who work in shops have to go home too.

Once you've seen one big indoor shopping centre, you've seen a mall.

My local big one the shops shut at 8, although they don’t open til 10. The restaurants/bars carry on through the night.

Local indoor small one is 8-6 but the outdoor part across the road is 10-8.

To quote Roll Deep "Late night shopping on a Thursday" Some shopping centres will have a specific day for late opening.

Yeah, open all day while the majority is at work. Many things we do wrong over here

Tell me about it! Moving from Oxford to Didcot. Shops closing at 6pm is infuriating

It's not just shops either, it's basically anywhere that doesn't serve alcohol. I've lived here all my life but I'm a bit of a night owl and I'm constantly struggling to find things to do in the evening that aren't the pub or evening classes or the gym.

No late night cafes where I am, the library is closed before I even finish work. The climbing centre is open until 10 but that's also not cheap and I have to walk through a dodgy area to get to it so it's not ideal. Some places I've lived don't have a climbing centre either. Sometimes near Christmas things are open until 8pm, what a treat.

It's a bit depressing to stay in at night, especially when I've been working from home.

It’s still based around the bloke being at work and the wife doing the shopping in the day

10-20 years ago 8-9pm wasnt uncommon in the big city shopping centres

Even my town of 100,000 people had 7pm closing thursday to saturday

Its just not busy enough now, like even a huge out of town mall an hour away closes at 7 when in the late 90s it was 10

Meadowhall closes at 10 pm except on a Sunday when they're legally obligated to close at 5 pm due to stupidly outdated Sunday trading laws.

I would say that if it was profitable then the stores would be open later. Opening longer means more staff, if all you are doing is spreading the same revenue over more hours then you increase the cost with no increase in revenue, that's not going to work for businesses.

There's shops near me that are open until 8 in the evening. During the day it is busy, after 6pm the car park is at most 50% full and most of those people are parked by the food outlets.

Businesses will do what makes them the most revenue and profit, not what suits people.

I am wondering where in the EU you are from because generally opening hours are even worse there. Germany and Austria are particularly bad, but in Italy and Spain opening hours appear to be almost random.

As someone who worked in retail - this gets mentioned all the time, yet whenever we did these and tried long term people just didn’t come to the store after 5-6pm. And for the most per the cost of staying open and the staffing is too much against the sales - or you need a huge sale to make it worthwhile.

The only real retailers that buck that trend are supermarkets.

If you're desperate to visit a chain clothing shop, eat at a chain restaurant and visit a chain cinema in the evening, in most parts of the UK you can do that at an out of town retail park. Shops will open till 8, you'll have a Miller and Carter and a Nandos or whatever and a Cineworld. Not all literally within the same building but it's the same principle. 

I agree it can be frustrating that shops in urban centres close early but equally you have to get people to actually work later hours or on Sundays and I sure as fuck wouldn't do that for £12 an hour or whatever so it is what it is. Not like we have a shortage of pubs, bars, restaurants etc in urban centres though if you do want something to do in the evening. 

Most shopping centres I know do open late. My local shopping centre is open until 8pm all week in the summer. And Bluewater our biggest shopping centre is open very late as it has a cinema and multiple restaurants.

When I lived in Singapore I was surprised to see that they had this figured out. Most retail shops opening hours were something like 11am to 8/9pm.

Took a little getting used to as I'm an early bird, but it was really nice being able to pick things up on the way home from work. Which was also easy as almost every MRT station has a mall attached to it.

Weather unreliable. It's how we are as a country. Summer evenings are precious and English people prefer beer gardens to malls 

I don't like late driving due to number of idiyots in hp cars 

I worked in retail for years and honestly, I’d prefer the standard hours were something like 11am-8pm or 12pm-9pm then people have time outwith working hours, I often had to stay back late as we would get an influx between 5pm-6pm anyway. Employees wouldn’t have to get up incredibly early just to stand about for a few hours since there’s no customers, also when I was working alongside uni I wouldn’t have to work full weekends as I could get some hours in during the week.

I work in a retail park where shops are open till 8pm and after 6pm things really drop off. After 7pm there’s usually only a couple people still in usually other people who work late and need to pop in for something specific. I’ve found it’s mostly south Asian and Eastern European people who are in later in the evening just browsing so perhaps a cultural thing dependent on when they’d have their evening meal etc. as a lot of Scottish people eat a bit earlier. We’re usually glad when it’s dead late on so we can actually tidy up and get returns back out on the shop floor in peace without customers constantly messing up what we’ve just tidied.

I think some of this depends on which country you're in, and then whether you're in a bigger city or not. If you're in Scotland, Sundays are great days for shopping, and probably dining too, if the centre has good options.

i've travelled to a lot of mainland Europe over the last ten years and it is so disappointing to come back to the UK and its terrible opening hours when you've been elsewhere.

Amsterdam's Primark is open until 10pm on a Sunday!!

Because the service industry loves to complain about how it's dying, while simultaneously not opening at times that people who will actually spend their money in the shops can go to them, they wouldn't be able to complain if they opened at times where they could service most working people.

Lots of independents around here now open at 10 or 11 and close at 6 or 7 or even later nowt

Because the shops presumably feel that the costs of staying open longer will not be offset by any increase in sales.

I wanted to go look at some nice independent shops near my house this past week and at least half were closed at 2pm on a Tuesday. The one shop that had hours posted is apparently only open 18 hours a week! I can't believe you can make a living only trading for such a limited number of hours. I want to support businesses, especially independent local shops, but they make it hard! I have no idea why shops do this. This is a small city of 200,000 ish and I live in the city center, just to provide context. I'm not talking about a sleepy village.

My shopping centres are open until 9pm. Even the small out of town ones are open til 7pm. We have 24/7 supermarkets. I've been to Spain and France where it's too hot during the day for shopping. They're open early and close for 4 hours for siesta. Then they reopen early evening where people will eat when the sun has gone down and it's more comfortable. In UK we don't have the problem with heat and it gets dark at 3.45 in December and its so cold everybody scurries of home to settle in for the night. I lived in Germany and shops closed at 1.00pm on a Saturday.

You say the EU, do you mean somewhere with a siesta culture? Because that makes a big difference...

Depends where you are honestly.
I know the ones in my city close around 5 and 6 but some shops in them stay open but some bigger shopping centres stay open late.

Out of town ones tend to, Cribbs Causeway here is 8pm I believe. But city centre people are up and gone after work. They'd be dead. OK so people may be eating or going to the cinema, but in practice not buying clothes. Thursday is often late night opening, try that.

Agree. I love when we holiday in Europe, and stores aren’t even opening until the afternoon. I lived in Australia and it’s the same as the UK. Open when I’m working.

The shops in the city near me close at 8pm, but local shops close earlier. I feel that 8am is fair (weekdays, it's earlier on weekends).

There's a big misconception in this thread that the majority of the population work 9 - 5. That's simply not the case.

Depends where you are at tbh, the shopping centre near me is great, loads of great shops inside and most of them open until 9pm at night during the week. Weekends are open until 6pm which is fine thanks to the longer openings during the week.

From the other side; I remember vividly when shops first started opening late nights thur/fri (to 8pm or from 5/6). This meant I was coming home from school and was home by myself until mum got in from work, around 9pm.

When I lived in the EU / Germany & Netherlands, I was pleasantly surprised - esp. Netherlands, that everywhere seemed to still shut at 6pm on all weekdays. It felt to me like it would help families with kids etc.. avoid the situatio I found myself in during late night opening hours.

What kind of weekend lunches are you having that don't finish until after 3pm?

In all honesty I'd prefer later opening hours, but I think it would take a paradigm shift that isn't going to happen. I think the current situation is good enough.

Plenty of shops around here stay open til 8 during the week and Saturday. Mainly the bigger ones but I can understand that as most smaller shops can't afford to sit there burning money for the odd customer who might be over from the EU and come in, maybe.

A while back some of my local supermarkets extended their hours and even did 24 hours during the week, but people didn't use it so they stopped.

Not all, some are open until 8-9. To be honest shops are usually dead around then, and unless there’s a cinema for people to browse or get food beforehand there’s no point being open.

The EU isn't uniform, and Northern Europe has earlier closing times.

In Denmark they usually close at like 5/6pm as they do in the UK, but many shops won't open on Sundays and close at like 3pm on the weekend. Most restaurants also stop food service at like 9pm at the latest.

Meanwhile, in cities like Madrid everything opens in the afternoon as it's too hot for much of the year to do anything during the day.

I don't know

Who knows. I don't even know why we open so early on a weekday either. Open 9-6 and you barely see anyone in the day unless it's a holiday or the weekend. It's really stupid.

I was in Japan a couple of weeks ago and was surprised most places didn't open until 11. It was frustrating with jet lag because I was up at 5/6am most days. Luckily the arcades opened earlier so I could hang out there until things opened, and family marts were open 24/7 so I could always get food. It was the same in Hong Kong as well. I prefer it. I know the day just starts later there, but there was an active nightlife. Stores were open later and were full everywhere I went. I know, bigger population etc, but it was still better.

There just isn't much to do in most city centers in the UK. There's a little more now, but it's still bleak in comparison to other countries. How many arcades do you see? Not counting the ones at the seaside or inside bowling alleys. How many activities? I know my martial art classes are gone. Priced out. My bouldering gym was awesome, but they kept having to raise the prices due to the city raising theirs. Other than the gym and the bubble tea place I liked, I never bothered going in. The cinema was on the edge of the city.

It's just silly. If you want people to spend money you need to bring people in. Cheaper parking/transport, give new activities incentives to set up. The more people coming in, the more money it will bring for everyone. Instead prices are just ridiculous and it's killing everything off.

I used to work at Next on a retail park, we closed at 9pm, 10pm the two weeks before Christmas. After 7:30pm no one came in and it was costing the company more to keep the shop open than they were making.

There's me working in a shopping centre that shuts at 8 weekdays 7 Saturday and. 6 Sunday and everything is shut after 6 on a Sunday when I'm working and shut when I start so I can't buy food after work 😂 8 Is too late in my book but it wouldn't be so bad if it was once a week When we open until 9 or later at Christmas nobody ever turns up and 4 onwards Sunday is usually quiet. And we've been open that time for years Most shops have lone working because it's too quiet and these are big brands like Yankee candles in a shopping centre that's popular and has been open for years In some cases being open until 8 Is pointless But most out of town centres shut at 8

Depends on the area right?

My local city. The main Westfield closes at 8pm on Thurs/Fri/sats.

I worked in a shopping centre for a few years that was open 9am-8pm and hardly anyone came in before 12 or after 4. Not just in the two shops I worked in, but in the centre. And it’s the main shopping place for the city centre. It’s not worth the money that the companies spend on overheads really because footfall is so low.

literally.. like i want a sweet little coffee and to shop in miniso after my shift but its a ghost town by the time i come out after work

We often had late night shopping at Clarks village where I once worked, I think it was 6-8pm extra. Was lovely as we basically had no customers. Popular at Christmas but generally not year round.

The shopping centre near me is open until 9pm. Well, the shops are. Restaurants, cinema and sports bar are open later.

I think the smaller town centre shopping centres close earlier and I agree, it’s silly.

The secret ingredient is laziness

In my place before the malls closes at 10pm. However 10pm itms not enough. Haha so many people still strolling around especially on fri’s and saturday.

The survival of shopping centres depends on adaptability. The ones that do thrive offer (decent) restaurants and coffee outlets to draw in customers. If you look to larger centres, they’re open late and host an enormous amount of the aforementioned which in turn can translate to sales (in theory).

Because despite whatever the UK thinks it is actually slipping into being a third world Country. I say this as a Brit I notice it more and more ever time I return from overseas in comparison we are really going backwards and being overtaken on nearly every front!

Mall culture and cost.

Point one - mall culture

UK doesn't have mall culture. I found when I was there people preferred to meet for a drink rather than to walk around a mall.

This is also partly due to the UK having decent weather. So you don't need to be inside all the time.

Also UK homes being bigger so people can invite guests over.

I'd also say the lack of public transport and security at night also means most teenagers and preteens may not be able hand out in malls in evenings like they do in other countries.

Point 2 - cost

Rent is cheap relative to wages. So most business owners see staying open for an hour extra as a waste of money rather than squeezing every hour out of their rent.

I'd say this point is also why most shops are super understaffed.

As they want everyone to just use Amazon as they don’t like change

It is mostly cultural as well as distance. I come from an average European city. It takes 30 min to commute any average distance. People often go out and meet their own friends after work. London- commute times are in excess of 1h. Then your friends might work in completely opposite directions. Going out after work is hardly a thing unless you are very close with your colleagues. And again, you need a break from the people you spend your days with.

You are right, its totally weird they want you to stay home