Closed on Sundays

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I have a long train ride and very little battery charge on my laptop (there were outlets on my last train that I discovered at the end, but none on this one) so this post is beginning life being written down…by a pen…onto paper. Insanity, I know.

So, about a month ago there was a news story about a law in France that made it easier for businesses to be open on Sundays. Of course, as an American, my natural reaction was “there are businesses that close on Sundays? There are businesses that close?!” Now that I have been to both France and Italy I have seen this phenomenon at work.

However it isn’t limited to just Sundays. Even the biggest cities have a ton of small markets, cafes, restaurants and bakeries that seem to close more or less when they feel like it. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but, as an example, the bakery (boulangerie) I found close to my hotel in Paris was open the first time I went on a Sunday, but when I showed up on Monday they were closed. The place I went to instead had a sign up saying that it was closed on both Saturdays and Sundays. Many places didn’t seem to bother to post hours at all. The one factor that seemed to guarantee that a place would be open was a high local density of tourists.

The other interesting issue has to do with the hours that the businesses are open. In the US, if a place serves food it usually does so all day, or at the very least is open for every meal even if it closes in between. This is absolutely not the case in Paris, where you have brasseries that are only open during the day, and restaurants that are only open at night. This definitely allows places to be more specialized. Restaurants don’t have to worry about having sandwiches on the menu to placate the lunch crowd.

Another issue that came up relating to this was the operational hours of supermarkets. There were quite a few of them around my hostel in Grenoble: a large chain one and a few smaller discount ones. Most of them closed at 7:30 (19h30 in the local parlance). The large chain store made a point of advertising that it was open all the way until 8:00. This blew my mind. I mean, I’m used to every store being open until at least 9:00, with many of the big chains open 24 hours a day (and none of them closed on Sunday, that’s for damn sure).

The 24/7 stores are clearly the result of America’s “the customer is always right” attitude. It’s entirely unreasonable for someone to expect a store to serve their needs at 4am, and yet the stores acquiesce rather than simply telling the customer (potheads, in this case) to come back when normal human beings do their shopping. I have no idea whether being open during each and every one of those hours makes the store more profitable, but even if it was incredibly profitable I have a feeling that the French would balk at the presumption that they should be open that long.

Questions I have: Would the French even adjust their habits and go to stores during extended hours? Would French labor laws allow get in the way of changing hours, especially if they tried to be open 24 hours? Why couldn't I get any broccoli when I went to the store that one time?

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Comments

[Bram]

Knowing the French, they would go on strike if they had to open their shops 24-hours a day. A funny anecdote; in Amsterdam, only shops in the touristic center are allowed to open every sunday, except for certain holidays that are also sundays. Thus, a supermarket manager outside the center made a list of all possible holidays in Europe and found that he could thus open his store effectively year-round. Eventually, a judge decided that he couldn't. It's very inconvenient that supermarkets close on the one day I usually have nothing better to do.