It seems that the Los Angeles area has only two or three substantial makerspace shops. Most of these have limited availability on weekends, operating mainly during normal business hours. To me this means these shops cater to students and are not interested in adult clientele, since it’s safe to assume most adults in these areas work a full-time job. Does anyone know what the reasoning is on this? I would think that Saturdays and Sundays would be the most busy days of the week for these shops.
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This is a great question and one that I could not find an answer for either. I even contacted the owner of the TechShop in SF to find out why they did not have a facility in L.A. His answer was that there wasn’t very high demand for their services. That just does not make any sense. So we have a mini silicon valley growing in Santa Monica but no demand for guys/gals who like to build hardware?
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Hey Robert, Our shop is open till 8pm and the reason for that is we do 4 hours after closing for contract 3D printing and lasercutting we do till 12am. The only day we are closed is Sunday because we teach classes that day. A lot of our clients that work a 9am - 5pm come in at 6pm or 7pm to use our shop. Saturday we are open all day. The reason for our shop hours are because we work a 10 hour work day 6 days a week and only have a half day one sunday for personal time. A lot of other makerspaces don’t take in enough income to have longer hours seeing as everyone at those makerspaces are volunteer. All volunteers work other jobs. I hope that helps in knowing about hours makerspaces are open for our shop and the reason why it’s more limited for other shops. -Maya
Thanks Maya. Nobody is expecting you to kill yourself with insane hours, being open for every possible customer at all times. Is it possible to put weekends on Monday & Tuesday, like mechanic shops do?
I would think that evenings, Wednesday thru Friday (5 - 11) and all day Saturday & Sunday, would be most ideal for both students and professionals. Teenagers tend to be on a late schedule naturally, and they have school hours which are pretty much the same as business hours.
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TBH, we haven’t heard of a very high demand for Sunday hours before now, while Monday/Tuesday are some of our busiest days. Most people working a 40 hour work week that want to work with us have been able to find hours that work within our 60+ hour/week open DIY shop hours, or if their schedule is packed simply request overnight contract work in the additional 24 hours we are available to work evenings, or our two hours classes every Sunday. All in all around 86 available hours/week total and the majority of hours that the general public is awake.
With working hours for 86 of the total 168 hours available in a 24/7 work week I’m at a bit of a loss for the frustration here… I often do get upset myself though too when I really want Chipotle at 2:00a in the morning and they’re closed because they simply like students more than me. I don’t understand why they can’t accommodate that my business doesn’t close until 8:00p and sometimes I get hungry in the middle of the night.
-Bryan
I’m not picking on The Build Shop. As I said, I notice the hours are limited on weekends with all makerspaces in our area. For anyone trying to go toward downtown from the westside after business hours though, there is also traffic to battle.
Feel free to offer your own free volunteer Saturdays and Sundays to run these shops. see a problem yet??
