Later store hours in traditional commercial districts

Scott Schimmel, a store owner in Knoxville, asks

do hstreet merchants have any type of core hours? I am trying to find the best way to approach "selling" the idea of consistency/regularity with respect to hours to a group of downtown merchants in knoxville, tn.

Yes, but it probably isn't the answer that you want, if you're looking for later hours.

Most H Street businesses are open from 10 am to 7 pm, Monday through Saturday. Although this isn't a formal requirement. Stores in the H Street Connection are governed by a traditional retail lease, and they are required to be open later, I think until 9 pm, except for the service businesses (jewelry shop, dry cleaners, florist).

Hair salons are closed on Mondays. More businesses than people think have Sunday hours, primarily athletic shoe stores (Sports Zone, Footlocker, Downtown Locker Room). A couple hair salons-barbers are open on Sundays. The Rite Aid and Auto Zone, national chains, and Murry's (a regional food store chain), are open til 9 pm or later (Rite Aid is open til 10 pm) Monday-Saturday, and until 6 pm on Sundays. The few restaurants that we have are open later.
Donovan Rypkema, a leading real estate-historic preservation consultant, has this quote: "if your business is only open from 9 to 5, then you're only appealing to the unemployed" which makes the point that as the structure of people's work and leisure time has changed, so should store hours.

H Street used to have a Sears store off the main corridor. It is fair to say that stores were open later back then, and when the shopping district was more successful, say in the 1950s before suburban retail became dominant. I just looked through the Washington Post backfile and found an ad (1946) from a store that had two! locations on H Street, the Kopy Kat women's clothing store, and the ad said that "neighborhood stores are open til 9 pm." Plus, later hours than downtown were one of the ways that satellite shopping districts distinguished themselves competitively.

Similarly, a Hecht's ad from August 7th, 1952, when Hecht's had only three stores: downtown; Parkington (which is now Ballston); and Silver Spring, listed open store hours Sunday to Friday downtown, and Monday to Saturday for the others. Each store had some late nite shopping hours. Downtown was open from 12:30 to 9 pm on Thursday, and the suburban stores were open from 12:30 to 9:30 pm on Monday and Friday. Of course, these days, Hecht's downtown store is open late Monday to Saturday, and is open on Sunday as well.

It was clear that city shopping districts were eclipsed when the Ourisman Chevrolet dealership, once one of the largest Chevy dealerships in the U.S. when on H Street, and now a successful company with more than a dozen dealerships, left H Street in the early 1960s for suburban Maryland. This was 4-5 years before the civil disturbances/riots in 1968.
In the Main Street world (http://www.mainstreet.org/) they recommend if you're working to get later hours in a traditional shopping district, work to do so one night/week at first, such as a Thursday or Friday, perhaps in conjunction with some sort of special programming, such as an art walk

Professor Norman Tyler at Eastern Michigan University has an online book on downtown revitalization. This page, http://www.emich.edu/public/geo/557book/c211.malls.html, discusses hours specifically and rightly points out that extending hours can be a hardship for independent businesses. Given the Rypkema quote above, it seems to me that it would make more sense for businesses to open later and stay open later, say open at 11:30 and close at 10 pm. However, at this time, safety and related issues would be an issue in our commercial district.

For some of the safety issues, you can check out something I wrote in my occasional blog at http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/.