A sweet shop is busiest in the morning and often closes when a restaurant is filling up. The two schedules are shaped by production timing and by when customers want each product.
Perishable production has to precede the day
Dairy sweets are made for the day they are sold, so production starts before opening and the display is at its fullest when the doors open.
Restaurants cook to order, so their prep can happen in the afternoon and their production peaks alongside the customers.
That single difference sets the whole schedule, because a sweet shop's staff have already done their main work by the time a restaurant kitchen arrives.
Sweets are bought before they are needed
Most sweet purchases are for later: for a gift, for guests expected in the evening, for a household to have on hand.
Buying early in the day fits that, whereas a restaurant meal is consumed at the moment of purchase and is therefore bought when people want to eat.
Morning trade also lines up with the earliest and freshest stock, which regular customers know and time their visits around.
Breakfast trade extends the morning further
Many sweet shops sell savory breakfast items alongside the sweets, using the same fryers that will later produce snack mixes.
That gives them a substantial morning business at an hour when restaurants are closed, and it uses labor already present for sweet production.
The combination makes the early opening economically sensible rather than merely traditional.
Evening demand is a second, smaller peak
Sweet shops see a second rush around the evening tea hour, when snacks and freshly fried items sell to people on the way home.
They generally close soon after, because the remaining perishable stock has to be cleared and the next day's production begins early.
Restaurants take over the late hours entirely, which is why the two businesses rarely compete for the same customer at the same moment.
Festival periods flatten the pattern
During peak festival weeks sweet shops extend hours in both directions and run production continuously, since demand no longer follows the usual daily shape.
Restaurants see the opposite effect in those weeks, as more eating happens at home and in exchanges of food between households.
The two businesses therefore have complementary rather than competing peaks across the year, which is one reason they coexist so comfortably on the same street.