Why Thursdays?

Today is Thursday, which means it's the only day of the week many stores  are open after 5 or 6pm. It's the one day during week you can get some shopping done if you have a job. Large chain grocery stores are open late regularly, but that's about it. I don't understand how this is a retail system that works. One would think that businesses would be more profitable if they stayed open until at least 8pm so people could patronize them after they're done with work. The reason for this, at least to my understanding, is that the minimum wage is high (about $16 or $17). Since labor costs a lot, many businesses can't afford be pay staff and operating costs for more hours in the day. The fact that people earn a living wage makes you not feel guilty for not tipping, even though it's weird at first coming from a culture where tipping is very important. It also means that many workers here don't work as hard for their tips as they might somewhere else, since they know they'll get paid the same either way. 

The main reason I mentioned all this is because I have to sometimes do more planning than I would at home to run simple errands. Northern VA is the land of convenience, where I knew I could still go out any day of the week relatively late to get just about anything I really needed. We had probably hundreds businesses walking distance or within a bike ride or short drive at our disposal more than they were not. 

I suppose this is why Americans are perceived outside of the US as being pushy and maybe unreasonable expectations of service. We are used to all our conveniences and haven't experienced many times when they weren't available, at least not for more than a day or two. We are the country that invented fast food, and we don't like to wait when we want something. We are used to being served by people who care about making us happy because they want us to pay them well. 

Anyway, it has been an adjustment in mindset being here.

In other news, now that the recent Walking Dead season has ended (sadness), it's time to re-watch the previous seasons of Game of Thrones so we can have some remote sense/memory of where all the characters are in relation to each other and why. This should entertain me until my trip home in the winter/summer (June/July). Speaking of that, I'm still not used to the opposite seasons here, in how I talk about them. It still feels like summer to me but everybody calls this autumn. How can it be autumn if the temperature is almost exactly the same as it was in summer? The only thing different is the sun sets earlier. I think of Easter as a spring holiday and it's not. I think of Christmas as a winter holiday and it's not. So backwards, this place, I tell you.