Discovering America's retail hours

I have been in America now for 10 months and 8 days, and you would've thought that during that time I would have gone out at least once on a sunday night. Oddly enough, tonight was the first time in years. I encounted another plumbing incident (I'm almost certain that my pipes despise me) 3 days ago (the details are not important as they only make me look like an idiot) and for three days I've tried on and off to resolve this on my own, then at 7pm Sunday night I had enough and decided to go tool shopping (which would've been interesting since my knowledge of tools as about as deep as the shallow end of a pool). I pack my children up against their will (they were in the middle of a Barbie session) and drove out to Lowes.

not thinking anything of the empty parking lot, I get the kids out of the car and walk up to the door that wouldn't open. Took me a while to realize that the store was closed (my light bulb moments are pretty dim whenever I'm focused on one task). I was baffled, then went off to Home Depot assuming that Lowes just closes early on sundays.

Home Depot was closed. I was very irritated going back home (I got lost since roads here are one way roads and I don't find myself at a hardware store very often) and couldn't understand why everything was closed so early. I kept thinking, "this is America, the country of 24 hours!"....or at least that's what we refered to it in Germany (a country that closes for the night in time for dinner and off all day on sundays).

Driving around in the dark I tried to remember if America was always like that, closing early on sundays, and if it was why is America refered to the country of 24 hours? (But I couldn't concentrate on recalling that detail from my past, my daughters believed that the moon was spinning out of control from the way it looked tonight, so I had to give a little astronomy/atmosphere lesson which kept interupting my thought process.)

For being an American, I sure do feel foreign sometimes!

Anyhow, I'm sure most of you all have known for some time now that in America, sundays are early work days for retail stores. If you didn't know, you do now.

Personally, I'm dumbfounded that it took me 10 months to discover this.