When we were launching Three Sixteen, Sunday was a genuine question.
Not logistically. Existentially. The name of this brand is a reference to John 3:16. The values behind it are rooted in faith. And one of the most visible expressions of faith in business — one I deeply respect — is Chick-fil-A's decision to close on Sundays. No exceptions. No matter how much revenue it costs. A principle held consistently, publicly, for decades.
I spent time genuinely wrestling with this. I asked people I trust. I asked my followers. I asked people who know the brand and people who know me. The conversation was real, not performative. And for a while, I was genuinely on the edge.
The Chick-fil-A model — and why it's worth taking seriously
Chick-fil-A closes on Sundays because its founder, Truett Cathy, believed that employees deserved a day of rest and worship. That principle has never wavered. It costs the company an estimated $1 billion or more in annual revenue. And yet the brand is more respected, more beloved, and more culturally significant than almost any other fast food chain in America.
The lesson I took from that is not that every faith-driven business should close on Sundays. The lesson is that when a business makes a principled decision and holds it consistently, people notice. The principle itself becomes part of the brand's identity — and that identity is worth something that no amount of Sunday revenue can buy.
So the question I was asking wasn't just operational. It was: what does Three Sixteen stand for, and does staying closed on Sundays express that better than staying open?
What the landlords decided
The question turned out to be largely theoretical. When we signed leases for our new locations, the operating requirements were clear: seven days a week, no exceptions. This is standard in most commercial retail agreements — landlords need consistent foot traffic for the development to work, and a tenant that closes one day a week creates a gap they don't want.
That clarity forced a real decision. We could refuse to open in any location that required Sunday hours — limiting ourselves to spaces where we controlled the terms entirely, which at this stage of the business would mean building everything from the ground up. We could hold out for locations where we wrote our own rules — like Chick-fil-A, which owns many of its properties precisely to avoid this constraint. Or we could accept the reality of the lease agreements and open on Sundays.
The honest assessment: we don't yet have the leverage to dictate our own terms to every landlord. That leverage comes from scale, from proven track record, from being the kind of brand that a developer fights to have in their project rather than the other way around. We're building toward that. We're not there yet.
Either we don't open anywhere that doesn't give us full control — or we build our own buildings, like Chick-fil-A — or we work on Sundays. We weighed all three. This is where we landed.
What the people said
Something unexpected came out of the conversations I had before making this decision. Many of the people who pushed hardest for Sunday hours were people of faith themselves.
The pattern was consistent: they go to church gatherings on Sunday morning, and they want somewhere to go afterward. A place to sit with their community, to continue the conversation, to have a good coffee and not be rushed. A café that's closed on Sunday afternoon isn't serving the people who just left their church buildings — it's absent for exactly the moment when that community wants to gather.
That reframing mattered to me. Being open on Sunday doesn't have to mean deprioritizing what the day represents. It can mean being part of what Sunday looks like for the people in our community — including the ones for whom faith is central to the day.
The real problem: the team
Deciding to open on Sundays was the easier part. The harder part is everything that comes after.
Sunday is the day most people in hospitality don't want to work. It's the day families gather, churches meet, people connect. Finding team members who are willing to work Sunday — consistently, willingly, with the same energy they bring to a Tuesday — is genuinely difficult. It is the tightest bottleneck we have at Wiggins Pass right now, and it will be the same challenge at every location we open.
This is not a problem you solve with money alone. A higher Sunday premium might help. But the team members who make Sunday work are the ones who have chosen to be part of this project specifically, who understand what we're building, and who find meaning in the work itself rather than treating it as an inconvenience they're compensated for.
We're still working on this. We haven't fully solved it. What we've learned is that the answer lives in culture before it lives in scheduling — in building a team that actually wants to be here, for reasons that go beyond the shift rate.
What we believe about Sunday now
We are open on Sundays. That decision has been made and we're not second-guessing it.
But the spirit of what Chick-fil-A modeled — that a business can hold a principle visibly and consistently, that faith and commerce are not in conflict, that the way you treat your team reflects something deeper than an HR policy — that spirit hasn't left the building. It informs how we think about the team members who work Sundays, what we ask of them, and what we owe them in return.
We don't yet have our own buildings. We don't yet control every term of every lease. But the vision for what Three Sixteen eventually becomes — a brand with its own infrastructure, its own properties, its own ability to make decisions from a position of strength rather than constraint — that vision is exactly what Three Sixteen Center is being built for.
Until then, we're open on Sundays. And we're trying to make those Sundays worth showing up for — for our guests and for the people behind the bar.
