This is why your local diner and grocery store aren’t open 24 hours anymore

At Norms Restaurants, a chain of Southern California diners, the motto is: “We never close.” 

“That’s part of the brand DNA. But unfortunately, after COVID, everybody had to make some adjustments,” said Mike Colonna, the president and CEO of the diner chain. 

Some Norms locations lost business during the COVID-19 pandemic and became unprofitable, Colonna said. A majority of Norms locations are still either open 24-7 or are open 24 hours some days, but some Norms restaurants no longer have a graveyard shift because it became financially unfeasible to run them. 

Before the pandemic, you might’ve had a local diner, grocery store, fitness center or pharmacy you could depend on to be open any time of day. 

The COVID-19 pandemic upended that, leading a variety of businesses to restrict their hours. Walmart stopped operating 24-7 during the pandemic, and has no plans to return to this model according to a spokesperson. 

Other companies that have reduced hours at some locations within the past several years include gyms like Planet Fitness and 24-Hour Fitness; retailers like Hy-Vee and 7-Eleven; diners like Norms and Waffle House; and pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens. (However, Walgreens and Planet Fitness told Marketplace that a majority of their locations are still open 24 hours.)

There are several reasons fueling the move away from 24-hour operations. Businesses have been grappling with the cost of labor, rent and food supplies. Although the economy has cooled down, the annual inflation rate reached a peak of 9.1% in 2022 – the highest level in 40 years. Employers, like Norms, already tend to pay night-shift workers more in the form of premiums because of the arduous hours they work.

It’s also difficult for some businesses to find enough workers willing to work graveyard shifts. At pharmacies, shrinking budgets result in understaffed locations and heavier workloads for employees. That in turn makes it harder to recruit people. 

Consumer habits have also changed. Nightlife activity has declined in some regions since the pandemic, according to the experts Marketplace spoke to. The downward trend has affected businesses that would have benefited from that foot traffic, while consumers who work from home can now pick up supplies during the day. 

Most people don’t work the graveyard shift, but there has been a steady decline in the amount of people working from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., a trend that’s become “especially pronounced” since the pandemic started, said Daniel Hamermesh, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Hamermesh, who’s been referred to as “Dr. Time,” and economist Jeff Biddle at the University of Notre Dame are currently researching the times of day people work and observing trends in working times since the early 1970s.

On average, 6% of workers were working each hour from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. in 1973. 

In 2019, just before the pandemic, that amount stood at 4.8.%. In 2023, 3.6% of workers were working during each of those off-peak hours, Hamermesh said. The decrease between 2019 and 2023 “shows the continuation of a decline in off-peak work that had been going on for a long time,” Hamermesh said. 

Restaurants and diners

Food prices have risen over the past several years, putting a strain on restaurants. 

Eggs, which are crucial for a diner like Norms that sells breakfast, skyrocketed in price during the pandemic after the bird flu infected millions of hens. In California, the wholesale price for a dozen large eggs hit $7.50 in December 2022 and now stands at $5.21. 

In 2019, eggs were just $1.62. 

Norms also pays premiums to night-shift workers because of the inconvenient hours, Colonna said.  

Nightlife activity in some cities is on the decline, impacting other businesses within that ecosystem that rely on each other. 

Before the pandemic, people might’ve gone to the club for some drinks, then gone to a restaurant like Norms to buy some food and coffee, Colonna said. But now clubs aren’t as busy at night as they once were, he pointed out. 

Alex Susskind, a restaurant industry expert, has also observed that restaurant demand in some areas has gone down at night. “After 11 o’clock, everyone turns into a pumpkin now,” said Susskind, a food and beverage management professor at Cornell University. 

The labor market is also “ripe,” which means workers aren’t clamoring to work the night shift, Susskind said. 

In September, the U.S. added 223,000 jobs, the most in six months, while the unemployment rate fell from 4.2% to 4.1%. (The economy added just 12,000 jobs in October, but that’s because hurricanes and labor strikes stymied job growth.) 

Grocery stores

Shifting consumer patterns are also impacting grocery stores, pushing some to move away from the 24-hour model. 

“Prior to the pandemic, some customers could only shop during off-hours for various reasons. With the rise of e-commerce in grocery, as well as a significant portion of the workforce in hybrid work schedules, customers can schedule pick-ups at more convenient times, or have groceries delivered without having to leave their home,” wrote a spokesperson for the National Grocers Association, which represents independent grocers, over email. 

At grocery stores, hiring workers has become more expensive. Labor costs increased by more than 15% for independent supermarkets between April 2023 and March 2024 – the largest increase on record, the NGA spokesperson said. 

The NGA also noted that it’s difficult to find employees to work overnight shifts. 

Pharmacies

Picking up a prescription anytime of day has gotten more difficult. 

“Twenty-four hour pharmacies offer access to patients when other health care options are closed, or ways to get your medications when you’re getting discharged from an emergency room,” said Veronica Vernon, an assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Butler University in Indiana. 

But pharmacies, even before the pandemic, had trouble properly staffing their locations due to a decline in reimbursements from pharmacy benefits managers, Vernon said. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated an already-existing trend. PBMs act as the middlemen between insurers, drugmakers and retail pharmacies, and determine how much insurers pay for patient prescriptions.  

A PBM will initially pay a pharmacy for filling a prescription. But if the pharmacy doesn’t achieve certain goals, the PBM will take back a percentage of that money in what’s known as a clawback, Vernon said. 

“For some pharmacies, this can be hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of the year,” Vernon said. 

To properly run a pharmacy, a pharmacist’s shift needs to overlap with other pharmacists. But with staffing budgets on the decline, that overlap time has decreased while the workload has increased, Vernon said. And pharmacists don’t want to work in a setting where they don’t have adequate support to safely take care of patients, she added.  

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated burnout for health care workers, including pharmacists.

Butler said she doesn’t think pharmacies will fully move back to the 24-hour model unless the existing reimbursement model drastically changes.  

“We need to better staff our stores, and to do that, you need to have a better bottom line,” she said.