Image: A tweet from aïs (@glamgamine) reading, "one thing I will never understand about adulthood is how I'm supposed to make appointments if I work full time and every place closes at 6PM."
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This is a cultural leftover from a time prior to the current capitalist collapse. There are three factors.
Understaffing.
Loss of downtime.
Shift to hourly pay.
First, understaffing.
As recently as 30 years ago (that is, within the working lifetime of people over 50), businesses had way more staff than they do now. If you ever feel like you're expected to do the work of 5 people, that's because you are.
A local-size grocery store, for example, would have dedicated cashiers for each register (probably between 3 and 5 registers depending on the size of the store) for as long as the store was open, which could be 2 full shifts. That's 6-10 cashiers only. Then, fully staffed shifts for each of the meat service, deli service, and bakery areas, another 12 or so. Then, fully staffed shifts for inventory and cleaning, probably around 5. And, to handle that staff of almost 30, at least one floor manager per shift, and one additional store manager who probably only worked one shift per day.
Today, you can expect about 1/4 of that staff on a daily basis, and all of them to be expected to perform all of those duties, from register to stock to cleaning to specialty foods.
Even a fairly small, local bank would have a teller for each window, another for the drive-up, between 1 and 5 loan officers, and a location manager, as well as a regional manager coming in probably 1-2 days a week, and their own in-house janitorial service.
Today, it's "lucky" to see two separate tellers doing counter and car service.
When a business is fully staffed, one staff member leaving early int he afternoon to take a doctor's appointment or go to the bank or whatever else doesn't do any harm. When it's understaffed like this, one person leaving can cause the whole business to stop entirely.
Second, loss of downtime.
One of the reasons worker productivity has gone up so much is universal, high speed communications. Only 20 years ago (within the working lifetime of the oldest millenials), if you needed to send papers to be signed, you mailed them and expected them back the next week. For urgent stuff like medical papers, you faxed them and expected them back the next day when the recipient did their morning mail check. At the very earliest, a morning fax might be responded to in an afternoon mail check.
Every single piece of communication being functionally instant means that a lot of "downtime" where you would be waiting on paperwork to arrive is gone. That downtime was also when you would generally be given leave time by your supervisor to go to appointments at other businesses, while still taking home that day's pay.
It's not like you can do anything in the office when you're waiting. And you did all your work for the day, so why would you be docked?
That brings us to:
Third, Hourly pay schemes.
If you're lucky, you might still see daily pay schemes in some factory assembly jobs (mostly ones with strong unions). You receive a quota in the morning, and once you've completed your quota to satisfaction, you just fucking leave because you're done.
Otherwise, this only still exists in salaried positions, which are getting rarer by the day.
More and more work is being shifted to hourly pay. This means that you can never be "done early" unless you want to lose the rest of that day's pay. It's a way for employers to steal either your time or your money.
Even 10 years ago (within the working lifetime of every millennial and the very oldest zoomers) most of the positions we see as hourly work now, were weekly pay instead.
So, if you get time off to go to an appointment during business hours now, you can cause your entire workplace to fail, miss "important" work tasks, and lose money.
And all of this is brand fucking new, meaning society as a whole has not yet shifted away from the system that had been working for literally centuries.
And yes, this does mean that people who worked jobs which were already hourly/otherwise as heinous as the ones we have now (food service and child care, mostly) had consistent difficulties arranging and arriving to appointments.
This is why the trope of the overworked waitress with no time to take her children to the doctor is so old, and yet is now so much more widely relatable.
