I got the call Saturday morning around noon — the one I’ve been waiting for since August. The local FFL/SOT gun store finally received my new 9mm Ti-Rant silencer from AAC, and they needed me to bring in my trust paperwork to fill out the Form 4 for the ATF. That’s the downside to NFA items: there’s always more paperwork and more waiting to be done. So I grabbed my trust documents, hopped in my car and drove straight down to the gun store . . . to find that it closed at 1 PM on weekends. And I was 12 minutes too late. At which point I was furious . . .

Does it really make business sense for a gun store to be closed on weekends? To, in effect, keep banker’s hours?

Gun stores generally service a population with disposable income, meaning those with a steady job. And that usually means they’re working from 9 AM to 5 PM, unavailable to hand money over in exchange for firearms during those hours.

My old gun shop in Herndon, Virginia, NoVA Armament, understood this concept. Not only did they stay open until 6 PM on weekdays, they were open all day on Saturday and the afternoon on Sunday as well. They adopted the radical idea that making themselves available when their clients wanted to patronize their establishment would be good for the bottom line.

This shop, Dury’s Gun Shop in San Antonio, doesn’t seem to grasp that concept. In addition to keeping banker’s hours, they’re only open for four hours on Saturdays. Oh, and they’re CLOSED on Sundays AND Mondays. Maybe the operation is just a hobby for the owner, but it’s like they don’t want to take my money.

If I ran a gun store — scratch that — WHEN I open my gun store, I plan to actually make it easy for people to visit my shop and hand me their hard-earned money. It’ll be 3 PM to 11 PM on weekdays and 9 to 5 on weekends. That’s the plan, at least.

The first step to good customer service is actually being available for your customers. And that’s something most gun stores just don’t get. I guess they prefer to sit on their OFWG asses most of the day and only be busy for a couple hours at lunch and a couple hours at the end of the day. Rant concluded.