My daughter runs her own food service business: a brick-and-mortar café, two food carts and a related catering business. With her business most of the time the work is “all hands on deck”. But sometimes that can vary.
When there’s going to be a holiday during the week, then the food carts won’t be out. The catering business may or may not be operational, depending on the holiday and whether they actually take on extra work at that time. The café will most likely be closed. However, depending on the work to be performed after this special day, whether it’s a weekend or normal, school-is-in-session work week – and also depending on the catering orders ahead – people may be working through the weekend to do prep work, to clean up after the finished catering jobs being picked up (and to do the runs to make those pickups, since most of her catering is drop-off and later pickup), hours may vary.
In addition, sometimes if people are planning to be away, such as on vacation – and she knows in advance – she might shut down one of the carts to put someone on the catering crew, and that could idle one of the other cart workers. I don’t think that’s a frequent occurrence, but I don’t get into her business, and I would imagine that other businesses face similar constraints on labor and other resources.
If school is not in session (at the U of Wisconsin, Madison), then the food cart on Library Mall may be reset at a new location in town, or could even be out of service entirely. And that often happens, anyway, if catering orders pick up more, and demand more than the usual catering crew.
And maintenance of the carts is a thing, too. They see pretty rough service, since she runs them year-round, even through Wisconsin winters, and they take a beating. So from time to time she has to take them off the road, anyway, to get unscheduled repairs completed.
Catering also runs on a different schedule, since it depends from week to week whether the job is a weekend affair, in which case some people might have days off mid-week, or whether the job is a luncheon, dinner, wedding or whatever.
Some employers care a great deal about their employees. They were all invited to her wedding last month, and she was grateful that so many showed up.