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Maybe broken: "maybe" hours
Jul 10, 2007
From the This Is Broken photo pool: a local business "maybe" has open hours on Tuesday and Wednesday.
But is it really broken? A good local business often has quirky hours but an unforgettable, unique customer experience. New Yorker foodies may recall the old Shopsin's restaurant in the West Village, which had a bizarre menu and no less strange opening hours. Dependability may not be everything, depending on what customers are looking for.
(thanks, Manda Mia)
On those "maybe" days, it would seem that they might open, or might not (obviously). But possibly on those "maybe" says they have something special on the menu (like a rare food item), or they will only open the door for certain people or something... I guess it might also depend on how many people show up to the restaurant doors waiting for them to open. Tuesdays and Wednesdays aren't the busiest for retail businesses so they may post "maybe" on the hours sign to denote that if they get enough demand, they may open the doors. It's all speculative of course... I think it's hilarious to see "maybe" on an hours schedule, don't think I've seen it before anywhere else. Is it broken? A solid reply I cannot offer. Oh wait... "Maybe."
while we were in southern California (see comment in air travel), my dad saw a sign with the "approximate hours" on it.
Point taken about the quirky hours/unique customer experience, but there's something else broken about this sign: The proximity of the day names to the horizontal lines below them implies that the information BELOW the line refers to the day listed above the line. It thus took me a couple of visual scans of the sign to figure out what it's really saying.
My first reading was that the sign lists all the times the shop is closed (itself a quirky thing, but it could work): Maybe Monday and Tuesday, and from 11:30 until whenever on Wed. through Fri. This of course implies some extraordinarily odd business hours, but that follows nicely when you use "Maybe" on your sign like that.
It's only when you get to the bottom that you see the intended connection between the days and hours.
Another thing that bothers me about businesses such as these are when they are closed on Sundays. Weekends are presumably the best time people have to be out and about shopping, and no matter what type of business it is, closing for half the weekend is just a stupid move.
@Eric- In my location (Lancaster PA, USA) there is a substantial Amish and Mennonite population, and many businesses close out of respect for religious observance.
Is this sign hinting that they might be open by appointment, saying "Maybe" in that they will open if you contact them beforehand with explicit interest? Sort of like many art galleries in Philadelphia...
I like the sign, it's refreshing. Those 'broken' guys are a bunch of dull nitpickers.