Busiest after midnight

In Riyadh and Jeddah the weekend evening does not start until about ten.

Before that the coffee shops are half full and the tables are held by people waiting for other people. From ten the room fills. By midnight it is busy, and it stays that way past one. Families with small children, at one in the morning, in the season and out of it.

I grew up with this and I still watch plans built as though it were not true. The daypart model in most media templates was drawn for a city that eats at seven and is asleep by eleven. Breakfast, commute, lunch, drive time, prime, late. Late is where the evening here begins.

So the schedule tapers from ten, closes its last slot at midnight, and files the rest of the night as out of hours. The money goes dark at the hour the customer is most awake. The order at half past one, the third coffee, the table booked for tomorrow night: all of it happens after the plan has stopped talking.

The reason this survives is that nobody measures the hour. A report that ends the day at midnight takes the two best hours of a Saudi weekend and puts them in two different days, split so neatly that neither looks like anything. There is no row in the template called after midnight. With no row there is no number, and with no number there is no argument to have.

The season, which opened in the autumn and is running now, widens the gap further. The city is out later than at any other point in the calendar, and the hours the plan has written off carry more people than any other hours of the week.

The plan has an evening in it. It is somebody else's evening.