Research · Auto repair
Closed all weekend
Seven in ten auto repair shops show no Saturday or Sunday hours on Google. Only one in fourteen shows both.
Seven in ten show no weekend hours, on the days a car most often fails.
This is not a mistake, and it is not a criticism. Running a shop six or seven days a week is a real decision about staffing and about your own life. It is worth seeing the number anyway, because it describes what a customer finds on a Saturday morning.
Saturday is where the gap is
Two thousand shops already open one weekend day, and almost always that day is Saturday. Only 664 show hours on both. So in most towns a driver comparing shops on a Saturday is choosing from a much shorter list than the one Google shows on a Tuesday.
If you already open on a Saturday, the number that matters is different: check that Google says so. A shop that opens and is listed as closed gets the worst of both.
How we got these numbers
We read the opening hours published on the Google profiles of businesses categorized as auto repair, using only profiles marked as operating. Each profile was counted once.
Of 10,854 profiles, 9,511 listed opening hours, and those are the ones counted here. The remaining 1,343 listed no hours at all. A day was treated as closed when the profile said so, and every profile that listed hours listed both weekend days.
An honest limitation: these are the businesses we chose to analyze, not a random sample of the industry. What a profile says is not always what a shop does. Some shops open on a Saturday without listing it, and others list hours they no longer keep.
What to do about it
- Check what your profile says. Search your own business name and read the hours as a customer would.
- Fix any day that is wrong. Hours you do keep but do not list are turning people away for free.
- Consider a half day. Even a Saturday morning puts you on a much shorter list.
- Set your holiday hours. Google lets you mark special days in advance, so nobody drives over to a locked door.