Hour Hands

Ask any shopkeeper when the shop is busy and the answer comes back straight away: evenings, after work, Saturdays. Ask how they know, and it turns out the answer is built from the hours that happened to stick in the memory. That is why the second person is on the counter at four o'clock, when nothing at all is happening, and one person is standing alone at seven with eleven people waiting. Hour Hands settles it with counting. One tap for each customer who comes through the door, on a target that fills most of the screen, so it can be hit without looking while you are serving. That is the whole of the work. Nothing about the customer is recorded - no name, no photograph, nothing that could identify anyone, and no camera or sensor of any kind. A tap simply means somebody came in. From those taps the app builds the shape of your own trading day and draws it as a dial: every hour a spoke from the centre, the busy hours reaching furthest out, with a small tick on each spoke marking what that hour usually brings so today reads as busier or quieter than normal at a glance. The shape is kept separately for every day of the week, because a Saturday has never resembled a Tuesday, and an average that mixes them together tells you nothing useful about either. Then it does the part that actually changes a decision. Tell it how many people you have on the counter in each hour, and how many customers you reckon one person can comfortably handle, and it divides your customers between your staff hour by hour. The hours where each person is facing more than your own figure are named and ranked, worst first. So are the hours with somebody to spare, because that is where the extra pair of hands can come from. It is careful not to claim more than it knows. No hour gets a usual figure until three comparable days of that weekday have been counted, and until then the app says exactly that instead of comparing today against a single previous Tuesday. An hour still running is judged against the part of it that has elapsed, not the whole, so early afternoon is not reported as a disaster at ten past two. A day you never opened is left out of the averages entirely rather than dragged through them as a row of zeroes. There is no money in it anywhere. No sales, no takings, no prices, no average spend. It counts people and divides them between people, which is a different question from what the till says and one that nothing else answers. Everything stays on the phone. There is no account, no sign-in, no subscription and no internet connection - the app requests no permissions at all, because it needs none. Your trading hours, your staffing and every hour you have counted belong to you and go nowhere.