Hey AGM!  3:00 pm US Central Time?  That's not convenient for ME (therefore, it is STUPID.)   
 
People have often asked why we open new AGM Catalogs, at 3:00 pm US Central Time.  Our friends on both the east coast of the US and the west coast find it inconvenient for as many different reasons as we have customers.  Everybody would prefer that we open at a specific time that works best for them in their particular schedule, and can't seem to understand why we insist on opening when we do.  No great surprise, there.
 
Here's the scoop.  This is an INTERNATIONAL business.  We value ALL of our customers.  The fact of the matter is, without the solid support of our international customers we probably would not be in business!  So, by experiment and accident, we stumbled across the 'ideal' time to open up a new catalog or online show.  Well, maybe "ideal" is not as accurate as "universally least inconvenient." 
 


We are trying to serve customers from not only Los Angeles to New York, but also London, Brussels, Sydney, Kabul, Johannesburg, Madrid, Tokyo, etc. We found that this 3:00 to 4:00 pm US central time is just about the only time that allows our friends in Europe (it is 10:00 pm in Brussels) to participate by staying up late, and Australia (it is 6:00 am in Sydney) to get up a bit early. This shifts a bit during the year with regional observations of daylight savings time. 
 
3:00 pm was not an accident. We actually put quite a bit of thought into it.  Is it perfect?  Nope, certainly not.  But few things are.