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I was on the NJ transit and saw an advertisement outside our local baseball stadium for TD bank. The ad said:

“Big fans of the patriots and longer hours” - TD bank.

I can totally understand why a Bank ad might endorse the local baseball team (patriots in this case) but I couldn’t for the love of god figure out what “longer hours” is meant to add to this advertisement.

My theories:

  1. They endorse working longer hours, because of covid job losses?

  2. They endorse the baseball players working longer hours?

  3. They endorse that the baseball games last longer?

  4. It’s an ad to say they have longer hours of customer support?

None of these seem to make that much sense to me. I’ve attached the ad below. Is there an obvious meaning to this sentence?

ad

Sidharth Ghoshal
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    Hello, frogeyedpeas. This is almost certainly a question about a local usage; it is more general information than English usage. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 01 '21 at 19:09
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    Common usage in the US to advertise “longer hours,” wihich means they stay open longer than they did before or longer than other similar establishments. – Xanne Mar 01 '21 at 19:48

1 Answers1

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Setting aside the baseball references above for the New England Patriots in the NFL, I think the marketing department at TD Bank is just trying to get some gratuitous support from Patriots fans and let customers (current and potential) know they will be extending their hours. Historically, banks have been criticized for being open only when people can't get there (Banker's hours), so TD may also be trying to dispel any lingering impressions of inaccessibility.

gorlux
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  • That’s curious now that most of bank employees are working from remote. Who cares about opening hours? – user 66974 Mar 01 '21 at 19:57
  • Clients of the bank care, because it directly affects when they can do things that they can't do online. – FeliniusRex - gone Mar 01 '21 at 20:46
  • This explains what the phrase longer hours means here, but it does not explain what connection between a particular sports team and the bank's longer hours justifies their being referred to in the same sentence, which is a part of what led to the OP's confusion. But then, that's probably unexplainable. – jsw29 Mar 01 '21 at 21:41
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    There is no connection other than TD wanting to get warm fuzzies from customers who like the team and/or longer hours. – gorlux Mar 01 '21 at 21:45
  • @jsw29 You expect logical consistency from advertising copywriters? You'll be expecting flying pigs next! – BoldBen Mar 02 '21 at 01:24
  • Right. The bank is bragging about its longer hours (which presumably will appeal to potential customers who spend many hours a day away from home, like people who commute to and from a workplace in a distant city by train), and it is using message misdirection to hook the idle pasenger's eye. "Big fans of the [New England] Patriots" is a commonplace assertion (although perhaps less so in New Jersey than in Massachusetts); but it leads into a switcheroo: "big fans of longer hours" doesn't make sense until you unpack the adjacent detail that a bank is saying this and banks usually close early. – Sven Yargs Mar 14 '21 at 08:27