Businesses/Shops opening in Cork city/suburbs.

It could be said for a lot of businesses in city center. I woukd definately agree that it should be open sundays too. And maybe close on a monday or tuesday

I didn’t realise lunch and shopping were mutually exclusive activities, go figure.

I don't get why people think it's weird to ask about opening hours? I can't get my head around why retail/service businesses run to business hours, when most people are at work. Open later, close later. Give people an option. Surely it's the behaviour of the customer that should be matched, not people trying to manage around an old fashioned approach to opening hours...

It is not weird. After all, businesses do what they want. If they get enough money with the current opening hours, good for them and they have no incentive to change it. You just can’t complain not having enough customers and finding excuses without being questioned about your opening hours.

I used to work close to the English market for years and used to cycle past it every evening going home from work. Never once could buy something as was always closed in the evenings after I finished work. This used to really annoy me.

I've always thought them opening an hour later would make a lot of sense and target the office worker. A lot of city center workers cycle or get public transport so would be easy to pop into the market to get something. Just my opinion.

Sunday is fine but a large number of passing footfall, especially this time of the year are tourists who contribute nothing to the businesses.

The main guys in there are working from 5am as they supply businesses in Cork. If you go past at that time you will see plenty of vans and hand carts going out to supply cafes, restaurants who need early delivery for their breakfast and lunchtime trade. Knowing a few of the traders, thats where they sustain their business, not from passing trade. They can't exactly tell the restaurants they will be an hour late.

Passing trade is still hugely important to them in terms of family name, daily trade, promotion etc, but ceertainly the bigger stalls cannot pay the bills on that. They try to keep staffing down to a minimum, the likes of Pat from O'Connells often does the drive to Castletownbere of a morning, Tim on Chicken in is on the road at some crazy time in the morning. Both have families and kids yet both are seen as 'faces' in the market that people want to see. They have to have downtime and if you look at the throughput of the market, its tailing off dramatically after 2pm on a weekday, so in my opinion 5pm just wouldn't be sustainable to justify staffing the larger stalls. Lets not forget, they can't just keep it ticking over with one or two staff at that time as the cleanup and pack away is one of the busiest times of the day so they'd have to maintain a decent head of staff.

The market is severely congested with tourists this time of year and it really affects trade, the traders have been complaining for years.

The council proposed a €2 ticket system for people going in to cut down on tourists - I know that sounds wierd, but the council are the landlords and were trying to protect their tenants. The traders shot that down as they want to be accessable even to tourists, markets have always been as much theatre as sales. On saying that, they have a business to run and staff to pay. 

The market currently employs over 400 people directly to work in the market, that doesn't include the people back at base preparing the produce. This number has stayed roughly the same for the past three years, very few layoffs post covid. Compare that to prices, fish prices (Cod / Hake) have increased up to a whopping 75% in the last year alone due to increase in fuel prices and drop in suppliers. Many boats have been scrapped under the EU scrappage scheme, thought to be up to 50 boats in Ireland which decreases availability and again increases prices. Chicken and beef are similar, poultry and beef wholesale prices have increased by 19.5% over the last 12months. These are all ratified IFI and CSO figures.

Sorry its long winded, but the long and the short of it is that the traders have to trade when they gain maximum benefit and simply cannot afford the luxury of catering for quieter hours and tourists.

The recent article caused quite a storm with the English Market traders association because it simply was not representative of the general feeling, they have always pushed for more park and ride rather than city parking. The traders interviewed were not long standing traders and appear to have been cherry picked.

"John Cleary Developments (JCD) said following extensive research, and a national and international marketing campaign for the proposed food hall, it emerged that without state-sponsored support, it would not be commercially viable. JCD said planning restrictions around hot food and take-out offerings were also prohibitive."

It wasn't the traders that dictated the end of that idea

The last Iceland store in Cork has closed

https://www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-news/corks-only-remaining-iceland-store-27374159

I passed through the English market yesterday, at around lunchtime. Came in from the Princes Street side, (that street is so run down it doesn't look appealing to enter the market tbh. )

Visitors resting against the fountain, eating their takeaway foods from stalls further inside the market, surrounded by the chicken and meats stalls. Tbh it looked terrible. Very little trading going on in this area, and I have to say, in the current climate, fairly expensive and not appealing to look at, display means a lot now and it all looked tired.

Passing those stalls though, heading into the inner area, was like a different world, packed with visitors, coffee drinking, snacks, herbs, spices, olives, fresh cakes...queues of people wanting food and takeaways.

Rounding the corners towards the fish, and fruit and veg, the older stores, and trade flittered away.

The alternative, fresh fast snacks and food inside seem to fill the niche where it's trendy to purchase there. I can understand that there's not so much to buying a chicken or 8 oranges and lugging around the city to get home. Can be bought anywhere. But honestly, the older stalls looked like they couldn't be bothered and haven't moved to upgrade their displays and make it attractive.

The Princes Street end of the market was destroyed by fire in 1980 and there was a further fire in the mid 80s. The city council renovated the building on both occasions. Maybe another ‘fire’ is due/needed.

Indeed that lifestyle sport area is a complete eyesore full of wackers

Opera House cafe is reopened a few weeks now as Half Moon Café. I haven't been.