Open on Sunday?

Boarding kennels mostly work Sundays — 69.6%of them are open. Grooming salons mostly don’t: 33.4%, a gap of 36.2 points between two businesses that frequently share a building.

The reason is structural rather than cultural. A boarding kennel has dogs on the premises whether or not the front desk is staffed, and Sunday is when people come home from trips — the weekend is the business. A grooming salon is appointment-based skilled labour, and a groomer working Saturday has already worked six days. Sunday is the day off.

Which means the mismatch lands squarely on the customer. Sunday is when a working dog owner is free, and it is the day the appointment-based half of the industry is least likely to see them.

The share is taken over facilities we could classify either way. Undetermined rows — where the published hours simply don’t address Sunday — are listed separately rather than folded into “closed,” which would push every number in this table in the direction of the story.

Boarding kennels are the most likely to open on a Sunday (69.6%), veterinary clinics the least (21.2%).

If you need a groomer and only weekends work, book well ahead — you are competing for a minority of the market, and the Saturday slots at the 1,440 salons that do open weekends are the scarcest appointments in pet care.

The self-serve wash is the structural answer to this problem: no appointment, and the format skews to long retail hours. If that is a fit, we list self-serve dog washes nationwide. And when you are checking a specific salon, the hours on its directory page are the ones we parsed for this piece.

Published hours, not observed hours. We read what facilities publish. Hours drift, holiday schedules differ, and a salon that takes Sunday appointments by arrangement without listing Sunday hours reads here as closed.

Parsing free text.Opening hours are prose, not a field. We classify a facility as open when Sunday hours are stated or covered by a range (“Sat–Sun”, “daily”), as closed when Sunday is named as closed or when weekday hours are listed with no Sunday at all, and as undetermined otherwise — 1,041 facilities, which we publish rather than assume.

Only enriched facilities. This covers facilities whose hours we have collected, which skews toward larger operations with a real website.