There’s a bakery in a town I won’t name, because the woman who runs it doesn’t deserve to be embarrassed by me, and what happened wasn’t really her fault. Here’s how it went. I was driving through on a Saturday morning, the kind of morning where you’ve been on the road since six and your coffee went cold an hour ago, and I wanted a cinnamon roll and a place to sit down. I pulled over, pulled out my phone, and searched. There it was. Closed, Google said. Permanently? No, just closed for the day. Saturday. A bakery, closed on a Saturday morning.
So I drove on. Found a gas station thirty miles up, ate a sad muffin out of plastic wrap, and didn’t think about it again until two weeks later when a friend who lives near that town mentioned the bakery by name. Best in the county, she said. Open seven days. Saturday’s their busiest morning.
The hours on Google were wrong. That’s the whole story. They’d been wrong for who knows how long, and every traveler like me who looked them up and saw “Closed” just kept driving. The owner never knew. How would she? Nobody walks in to tell you about the customers who didn’t come.
Here’s why this happens, and it’s not because anyone’s careless. A baker knows her hours the way she knows her flour order — they’re the same every week, built into how the shop runs. She was there at six on that Saturday morning, same as always. The listing was set up once, years ago, and nothing in the daily work ever signals that it needs another look. The problem is the listing isn’t for you. It’s for the person sitting in a parked car a quarter mile away, deciding whether you’re worth the turn.
And it’s worse for seasonal places. If you’re a farm stand that only runs summers, or a gallery that cuts back after Labour Day, Google doesn’t know any of that unless you tell it. It’ll happily show your July hours in November and say “Open” on a morning when your door has been locked for weeks.
So here is the one thing I want you to do this week. Go to a computer or your phone and type business.google.com into the address bar. Sign in with whatever Google account you’ve got, or make one. It’s free and takes a minute. Search for your business. If it’s already there, click “Manage.” If Google says you need to claim it first, do that. They’ll mail you a postcard with a code, or call the number on file, just to make sure you’re really you. Once you’re in, find the hours. Look at them like a stranger would. Are they right? Right for this season? Did you remember to set holiday hours, so you’re not showing “Open” on Thanksgiving morning when you’re home with your feet up?
That’s it. That’s the whole job. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty if the postcard thing slows you down. You don’t need to hire anybody. You don’t need to know a single technical thing. You just need to look at what the internet is telling people about you and fix the part that’s a lie.
I think about that bakery sometimes. There’s a version of that Saturday where the hours were right, and I had my cinnamon roll, and I’d be telling you the name of the place instead of keeping it out of this on purpose. She lost a sale she never knew she had.