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Comment by alephnan | Hacker News Reader

> Crazy Eddie stores stayed open on holidays and Sundays, at a time when many retailers still followed a Chick-Fil-A schedule.

Wait. Retailers weren’t always open on Sunday?

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In the US a lot of places used to have so-called "Blue Laws" that restricted what you were allowed to do on a Sunday. Some places still have reduced versions that apply specifically to vices; e.g. where I live in FL, alcohol sales are restricted on Sundays to certain times.

It used to be heavily regulated in Canada (or at least Manitoba) until very recently as well, like some time in the last 20 years or so. I remember when Wal-Mart first entered Canada, they had a really hard time in some places because labor laws and blue laws prevented them from being open 24/7.

Formerly very catholic Quebec still has one of those crazy laws.

During certain hours (such as, past 8PM on weekends), groceries are only allowed 4 employees. Which is almost impossible in those very large groceries. For many groceries, they just assume this is part of doing business, they would rather pay the fine than angering customers with long lines.

https://www.economie.gouv.qc.ca/bibliotheques/conformite/ouv...

I know a lot of places in MB still open later and close earlier on Sunday but I don't visit as much as I used to or keep my pulse on the civics anymore so I don't know if that's convention or blue laws.

These laws were repealed just a few months ago, actually.

>In the US a lot of places used to have so-called "Blue Laws"

Used to? Hell, in Texas, you cannot buy alcohol until after noon on Sundays. Still. Today, er, yesterday, but you get the point.

Fun fact this is also true about Chicago except it's 11am.

Not just that, but you can only buy beer and wine on Sundays, and only at places like grocery stores.

Liquor stores (which also sell beer/wine) are not allowed to be open on Sunday, period.

Note this pertains to off-premise (i.e., stores, not bars) only. Bars, you're free to get sloshed to your hearts desire on any type of alcohol and as early as 10AM on Sundays.

This used to be the case in New York too, but those laws were repealed in 2008. It seems there's been a trend since around then for municipalities to slowly repeal alcohol blue laws as a few other places followed suit over the next few years.

Unless you're in a state determined to make a real-life Gilead where the laws are getting more restrictive than less. I present to you as an example the same Texas from earlier.

In New York, until 2006, liquor stores were closed on Sundays. Was quite common across the US

It's by county in New York. Where I lived liquor stores were open but not until 11 or 12 I can't remember exactly it's been a while since I lived there. Similarly, you couldn't buy beer between 2am and 8am. I am probably misremembering the times a bit because it was a long time ago but that's roughly what it was where I lived in NY.

> In the US a lot of places used to have so-called "Blue Laws" that restricted what you were allowed to do on a Sunday. Some places still have reduced versions that apply specifically to vices; e.g. where I live in FL, alcohol sales are restricted on Sundays to certain times.

Blue laws around vices (specifically around the sale of alcohol) are still commonplace in the US.

However, Bergen County, NJ, still has the rare Sunday blue law that applies to everyday consumer goods -- you can purchase food and medicine on Sunday (and even alcohol after noon, per a state-wide vice blue law), but everything else is prohibited. If you visit a big-box store like a Costco or Walmart that sells both food and goods, large swaths of the store will be closed down on Sunday.

https://www.wnyc.org/story/assessing-bergen-countys-blue-law...

No. In the distant past of the 1990s and earlier, lots of stuff was closed on Sundays. Get this: many gas stations used to close at night. Lots of grocery stores used to be closed by 9 or so on a week night, if they were even open that late, and earlier on the weekend. Even Wal Mart closed fairly early most days (IIRC they started rolling out the 24/7 thing to many stores—though I think still not all, even today—a while after they introduced the "super center")

Quel surprise... how could Walmart have known about Canadian laws beforehand. :-D

Not all stores are 24 hours, moved to North Carolina and the Wal-Mart by us closes at 11pm I believe. That's weird to me since it seemed like all of them in California were 24 hours.

That’s a “since the pandemic” thing. Most all were 24 hours for many years.

Plenty of Wally Worlds are still not 24/7.

People are acting like this is a relic of the past, and I'm surprised you're surprised. I live in a small-medium-sized Canadian town at the edge of the GTHA (not the hub of economic activity, but not exactly the boonies) and many shops are still closed on Sundays. To the extreme even—many only open for short hours (4-8) during the weekdays and a half-day Saturday. It's a relatively quiet place. We've wondered how some can stay in business. Given the area, our guess is wealthy families backing them. I don't think massive profit is their primary motivator, just involvement in the community. And social influence, I'm sure.

Consider that for a lot of shops and restaurants demand might be inelastic over the course of the week. If everyone in town is closed on Sunday and consumers don't have convenient access to other options it's likely that demand will simply shift to other days, thus being closed on Sunday would reduce operating costs without significantly affecting revenues.

This is arguably a big factor for both Chick-fil-a and liquor stores that are prevented state-wide from opening on Sundays (in the US)

The problem for me (at least with Chic-fil-a) is that I am really only eating fast food ever on Saturday or Sundays. Those are the days I have off and the days I am most likely to be traveling (by car or other) and when I would be mostly likely to indulge in fast food. Probably about 2/3 of the times I would have gone to Chic-fil-A I could not due to the Sunday closure.

In some cases for sure. Our speculating was about some oddball cases—like clothing stores that are never busy and only open a few hours a week. And dealing in odds or purely consignment goods. They must be hobby projects (expensive ones, considering the rents around here).

But for others, definitely that's the case. And it's been this way for so long I'm sure it's just a known and we're essentially tethered to Hamilton via transit and highways so there are a ton of options just a few minutes further down the road.

In The Netherlands, opening times were strictly regulated by law up to 1984 : no openings on Sunday, weekdays not later than 18:00 and Saturday no later than 17:00.

This scheme was common up till the mid nineties. Since then it has been relaxed, but it is still regulated.

One of the reasons listed for the regulation is the protection of 'Mom & Pop' stores.

> One of the reasons listed for the regulation is the protection of 'Mom & Pop' stores.

A silly motivation. Smaller-scale businesses on the "convenience store" model are more likely to provide extended opening hours than any large store operation. That's as close to "Mom & Pop" as it gets.

I don't get your POV.

I talked about the 80s and 90s and a healthy work/life balance was still a political talking point at the time.

Also single worker households, which meant there was someone to patronise those stores while the breadwinner was themselves working.

(To be clear, I'm not saying everything was great in the days of "all women are house wives" but it would have been nice if the stigma of a house husband went away instead, rather than the actual turn out of "both adults must work").

> rather than the actual turn out of "both adults must work").

It was almost an inevitably. Especially for the middle class, I would imagine that both sides of the couple working provided a substantial boost in economic mobility. Or at least a perceived one. At that point its just keeping up with the joneses.

The motivation was religious.

The Winkeltijdenwet was instated in 1976 when we had the Den Uyl government, which consisted of Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA), Katholieke Volkspartij (KVP), Anti-Revolutionaire Partij (ARP), Politieke Partij Radikalen (PPR) en de Democraten 66 (D'66)

That is a lot of left radicals and only 1 religious party.

As you are no doubt aware concessions are often made to smaller parties in order to secure their votes on other subjects is well established in Dutch politics.

There is no reason to assume the left wanted to work on Sunday.

https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/kst-24226-3.html

And many others besides.

Really, why would you even try to argue something that is pretty much settled history at this point in time? The Netherlands historically had a very strong religious streak running through it and one of the last vestiges of their direct influence on Dutch society is the 'Winkelsluitingstijden' law.

That link is a wall of text. Could you please quote what is supposedly proving your point? Because I can't find it.

Probably in Gelderland, I guess? Not too sure about the rest of NL.

Limburg and Brabant are in the present day a lot more religious than Gelderland, as is Zeeland and a large chunk of the area North-East and East of Amersfoort.

NL is percentage wise (or rather, was) one of the countries were religion was 'on the way out', unfortunately that trend seems to have first stabilized and is now reversing. It's a pity because personally I think religion should have absolutely no place in politics or organized society, though I do believe that people should be free to practice whatever religion they want as long as it does not negatively affect others.

I last visited NL about two decades ago, and spent most of my time in a Gelderland village. I must say that I was reasonably well-tolerated as a visiting heathen ;)

As you mention, it's the religious intolerance that one finds disturbing, not religion (of any kind) itself. It is fairly rare to have one without the other these days, it would seem. The phenomenon is not limited to NL alone, I think.

That's fair but the strong Islam presence has lots of people upset to the point where I would say the Dutch (as a group, of people without religion or subscribing to some religion) are now less tolerant of (other) religion(s) than they were 20 years ago. This is a factor in the right wing extremist presence who use this to drive a wedge between people who otherwise probably would not care that much, it is clearly positioned as 'Islam against the rest'. Most notable for this is Geert Wilders, who is a complete asshole but there are others as well.

Gelderland (where my family is from) is definitely more religious than say Amsterdam, but far less than the South of Limburg or the 'Bible Belt'. At the same time, those are all various offshoots of Christianity, whereas if you were to look at Islam you will find the opposite, it is strongly represented in the big cities, where there is hardly any Christian offshoots left (and if they are they are dying).

Churches are disappearing, Mosques are rising up everywhere, and I'm not sure if the longer term will find NL with a more tolerant version of itself or if it will regress at some point.

It's not really the Islam presence that bothers people, it's specifically intolerant, militant religion that happens to be of the Muslim type. Let's be clear, nobody there is complaining about an overabundance of wise Sufi mystics.

No, but there are many more people complaining about morning calls to prayer than there ever were to complain about church bells (with the exception of Tilburg).

Same thing in Germany. All shops are closed on Sundays and bank holidays, and while opening times on weekdays have been deregulated in most states, some - like Bavaria - still enforce opening times of no more than 6:00 to 20:00 or 6:00 to 22:00.

I'm generally a fan of longer opening times, but having a day where everyone but entertainment and hospitality has free time simultaneously seems very healthy for both families and society at large.

> All shops are closed on Sundays and bank holidays

Unless, of course, they are in a train station. This loophole seems to be _heavily_ exploited.

For many, many years they were prohibited from being open on Sundays due to so-called "blue laws" which were ubiquitous, at least where I live on the East Coast. They started to be repealed in the 1970s for general retail and the 2000s for alcohol. In some locations (a couple towns in New Jersey IIRC) blue laws are still on the books and stores are closed on Sundays.

When stores first started opening on Sundays it was usually for only limited hours. I remember everything shutting down around 4-5pm on Sundays when I was a kid. That's not really the case anymore. When I was a teenager in the late 90s I was paid $1 more an hour on Sundays.

This was published in the NY Times in 1986

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/19/nyregion/sunday-shopping-...

>Similar changes are being felt throughout the region and indeed in most parts of the nation. Like New York, many other states in recent years have struck down legal restrictions that prohibited the sale of most goods on Sundays. The curbs, called blue laws, date from colonial New England, with the observance of the Sabbath being their main purpose.

In the 90s in Manhattan, almost everything was closed on Sunday until the evening. When I asked our hotel receptionist about it, she said, "It's so everyone has enough time to read the New York Times Sunday Edition". I'd like think that's apocryphal but as a teen at the time I believed it.

It stood out to me because in California most everything was open on Sundays. So it seemed to be more of an East Coast thing.

When I was young, the only places open on Sundays were grocery stores and gas stations.

We had one KMart open on Sundays. If we needed something on Sunday, that was the only place to go.

From my memory opening on Sundays slowly became the norm through the late 80s and early 90s in Texas.

Yeah it's tied to the rise of rent and the fall of wages.

Some of the New York camera stores are closed on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath) to this day. I think there's even one or two that actually disable ordering from their web site on that day.

A state I lived in as a child allowed grocery stores, restaurants, and pharmacies to be open on Sunday, but not much else. Restaurants were also allowed to sell alcohol on Sunday, while liquor stores weren't. A local restaurant took advantage of this double loophole and put in a drive-through booze window that they only opened on Sunday.

shops in the UK are STILL restricted to six hours of trading on sundays, the law was last changed in 1994[1] and the number of hours that a shop may open on a sunday is determined by the shop's size.

there are some exemptions such as airport shops, petrol or motorway service stations, etc.

the main reason there are still legal restrictions on sunday trading are advocacy groups such as "Lord's Day Observance Society" and the "Keep Sunday Special" campaign.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Trading_Act_1994

Yup. Can't buy electronics and clothes on Sundays in NJ b/c of Blue Laws. Garden State Plaza, one of the largest malls in NJ, is still closed on Sundays because of this.

When I last lived in the area (pre-pandemic), Garden State Plaza itself would be open on Sundays (the mall has a bunch of restaurants and a movie theater), but most shops would be closed. And it extended beyond electronics and clothing -- most consumer goods would be unavailable on Sunday, and there was always a puzzling list of exceptions (for example, cosmetics could be sold, but paper notebooks could not).

Can you get Amazon same-day delivery there, or is that also restricted?

Costco Business Center isn’t open on Sunday! I nearly found out the hard way yesterday.

Grocery stores often weren't, as recently as the 90s, at least in New England.

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