What we can learn from a bloke called Don.

Why not being open for business might be the best business you can do.

In the village where I used to live, a bloke called Don ran a fish and chip shop. He called it Don's Fish & Chips. I like that, in the same way that I like how fish and chip shops normally advertise themselves; with a sign on the side of the road saying "Fish and chips". Has there ever been a simpler or more effective advert? You try driving past it on a Friday night in winter.

Anyway, the most notable thing about Don's Fish & Chips, aside from Don's under-appreciated abilities as a marketer or the quality of his fish and chips (always wrapped in newspaper, of course) was its opening hours: Don closed for lunch.

To be fair to Don, lunch is almost certainly not as busy a time as dinner for fish and chip shops, but it strikes me as being quite an important time nevertheless. More importantly, Don did actually open at lunch time: As I remember it, there was a window between about midday and 1 o'clock when the fryers were going and Don was happy to see you. But after that your luck was out. Don, you see, didn't actually close for lunch. He closed for his lunch.

I imagine there are many fish and chips shops around these days that don't open at lunchtime, but whether they do or don't will, I assume, be driven overwhelmingly by commercial considerations. Don's decision to open and then close was driven by concern for his tummy.

I love Don for that, just as I love any business that closes when it could make money by being open. I used to know a garden centre that stayed closed on Sundays long after everyone else started opening. Why? The owners were Christians and thought Sunday should be a day of rest. Didn't matter that everyone else thought it was a perfect day for buying hydrangeas. In fact the little shop in the village where I now live was closed on a Wednesday afternoon until about a year ago, when its ownership changed hands. Why? Because the previous owners liked a little break in the middle of the week. Complete pain for us when we needed a loaf of bread, but that's OK. We got used to it. Just bought it that morning instead, or went a day without bread for lunch.

This isn't an argument about whether it's better or worse for business to be closed to customers sometimes (though, for the record, I don't think it's quite as black and white as we might imagine). It's an argument in favour of recognising that some things are more important than the next sale. Eating, resting, worshiping. Don was possibly the worst businessman I've ever met. And the best.