Why your favourite bakery closes on Mondays

Your favourite bakery probably shuts on Mondays because a small team needs a day off, and Monday is the cheapest one to give away. That's my reasoning, not a finding. I couldn't find a single Malaysian figure on this, so every real bakery below is foreign and every sum is mine.

Has anyone counted?

Not that I can find. An American piece on restaurants says Monday "has traditionally been the slowest day of the week", then concedes "no one's done an extensive survey" of why.² Restaurants aren't bakeries, either, and for all I know a bakery's Monday breakfast crowd is perfectly healthy.

The one bakery report I found with a reason in it comes from Cincinnati, where a chain closed its shops on Mondays for the rest of 2021, bar two holiday weeks.³ Its reason wasn't sales. The report put it down to "extreme staffing shortages", and the chain's spokeswoman said they'd rather not "lean on them harder".³

So there are two explanations going round, the slow day and the tired people. In a small bakery, I'd bet on the tired people.

The sum that costs a whole person

The hours are the first problem. A baker profiled in Philadelphia wakes between four and five, gets in around six and closes up at about half past four. "That is the baker's schedule," he says.⁵

Peninsular Malaysia's Employment Act sets the normal limit at eight hours a day and 45 a week.¹ So here's a hypothetical. Say a bakery needs three people on at any time, one at the oven, one at the counter and one doing everything else, for ten hours a day.

Open six days, that's exactly enough work for four people at 45 hours each.¹ Open seven and it's enough for about four and two-thirds, and nobody employs two-thirds of a baker.

My sum leans on the long day, though. At eight hours a day, six days and seven both round up to four people, and on paper the seventh day costs nothing extra.

People a small bakery needs, my rough guess

A part-timer would do it for less, and the American piece names that as one of the costs a closed day avoids.² That's the fair objection to my sum. A part-timer who can run an oven at dawn on a Monday is still a person you've got to find, though.

Then there's the rest day itself. The Act gives every employee "a rest day of one whole day" each week, on a day the employer picks, and generally nobody can be made to work it.¹ Someone on a monthly wage who does work a full rest day gets an extra day's pay.¹

Here's the small detail I enjoyed. If everyone in a workplace has the same rest day, the employer can display a notice instead of preparing a roster every month.¹ So "Closed Mondays" on the door may be doing a second job.

The owner is a different case. As I read it, the Act protects employees, so an owner who bakes has only the day off she gives herself, by pulling the shutter down.

What Monday has to earn

Stay with the hypothetical. Say that fifth person earns two thousand six hundred ringgit a month, a round figure I've picked for the sum and nothing more. A month has about four and a third Mondays, so if she's only there because of Mondays, each one carries about six hundred ringgit of wages.

Ingredients might take about a third of sales. That's a guess, because I couldn't find a Malaysian figure for a bakery that size.

Where a RM1,000 Monday goes, my rough guess

On those guesses, Monday has to take about a thousand ringgit just to stand still, before anything an employer pays on top of a wage. At eight ringgit a loaf, that's a little over a hundred and twenty loaves, on the day the American piece calls the slowest.

I could easily be wrong about the size of this. What would change my mind is one Malaysian bakery's weekly till roll, showing a Monday that comfortably clears its own wages.

The catch in closing

Closing has one real risk, which is that your regulars discover the place down the road. In Lyon in 2012, that fear reached a tribunal.

Authorities had ordered every bakery to shut for at least one day a week, after some complained they couldn't close while rivals stayed open.⁴ "A majority of us want to have one day a week when we close," one baker said, so they could rest "without having to worry about competition".⁴ Another owner had opened seven days a week for two years and said it had "allowed us to employ an extra person".⁴

He has a point, and it's my sum seen from the other side. He also had three bakeries, which is a different sum from one.⁴ I lean towards the first baker for a single small shop, and towards him for anyone with enough staff to rotate.

Which day, then?

If I owned a small place, I'd work out what my worst day has to earn to pay for the people who make it possible. It needn't be Monday. The Act only says one whole day, on the day the employer picks, so a street with a brisk Monday might give up Tuesday instead.¹