Easter Sunday trading

Sales floor area, I believe, though I do not know the actual maximum size of floor that is still allowed to trade ...

ATB from George

Small shops in England and Wales can open any day or hour. There are no trading hours restrictions in Scotland.

Size of a small shop

A small shop is one that measures up to and including 280 square metres.

This area includes all parts of the shop you use to display goods and serve customers. You can’t get around the restrictions by closing off parts of your shop on certain days.

Rules for large shops in England and Wales

Shops over 280 square metres:

• can open on Sundays but only for 6 consecutive hours between 10am and 6pm
• must close on Easter Sunday
• must close on Christmas Day

 

The bit in red should be changed to "must close on Sundays". Then bullet point 2 would be unecessary and Small Shops could make a come-back.

They're not shut in Scotland.

I don't believe minority religions should make the rest of the country abide by it's beliefs and practices.  If someone is religious then fine, they can observe that religions teachings but stop forcing it on the rest of us.

Mum seemed to manage to feed and clothe us when the shops closed every Sunday , most Saturday afternoons and either Wednesday or Thursday afternoons.

When she worked in shop retail she campaigned to get a reduction in working hours for shop workers, this was obtained and then she was disappointed to find that the corner shops then started opening all hours.

Personally it wouldn't bother me if the old Sunday closing laws were brought back.

At least the supermarket car parks could be used by learners to get car/vehicle  handling skills off road, rather than try and learn in amongst the busy highways. 

You can keep your Sunday special, I want shops!

Many thanks for your post Voltaire,you have answered my question `spot on`

if my poor memory serves me M & S  always,always used to shut on sundays but in the end got the message that they were being left behind in the greed race to make that xtra quid.

Mista H

Its got sod-all to do with religion these days. Pick any day of the week, Tuesday would suit me fine.

"Keep Tuesday special"

Chaps

Over here in Spain, everything other than restaurants and bars close down on Sundays.  You soon get used to it and the one thing you see here that you do not see so much in the UK, is families going out together. That has got to be good for society in general.

I was originally irritated by not being able not to shop on a Sunday but now to be honest I think it should be re introduced back into the UK, the traditional day of rest has worked for centuries and removing it was a mistake.

Regards

Mick

Mista P

Are you being fair to the female posters on this M/B by starting your posts with....Chaps

This calls for moderation ! / ?

Mista h

Chaps - A definitive guide:-

John.

Don't you struggle to do the laces up John?

Ah; the great British compromise eh? The aftermath of the stranglehold of religious law is still with us, so we shouldn't really open shops on a Sunday because we're an allegedly Christian country (says the PM), but we have to keep the shopkeepers happy and the wheel of commercial greed spinning.

So we have an illogical cake and arse party of different opening times for different size stores on a Sunday.

I would like to return to no Sunday trading; allowing shop staff time off, and giving back one day of the week its erstwhile special flavour.

It ain't gonna happen of course.

John.

The appropriate shop opening hours should just be an economic decision by the store owners. If we restrict shop opening hours, we would possibly need more shops as our shopping would be more concentrated. That's not efficient use of our increasingly scarce land. Don't forget we would have pretty much the same amount of money to spend, regardless of store opening hours.

The other effect of restricted hours might be that people would adjust their hours of shopping to smooth the crowds. Or people might even decide that shopping-as-recreation was a bit dumb.

Shops won't open if no-one attends. As a society, we collectively, but unconsciously, decide how much we value longer trading hours.

The "small shops are unfairly impacted" argument is bogus. We have already (collectively) decided that we much prefer to drive to large malls in the suburbs than to walk to the local village. We decided this because it makes our stuff cheaper, and we can therefore have more of it. This is admittedly more prevalent in North American and Australian suburbs than in the UK and the rest of Europe, in my experience and observation.

We are increasingly deciding to do not even this and to just buy it all from Amazon. Suits me, I have never seen shopping as a significant and worthwhile use of my time (although I do enjoy the occasional browse through interesting stores and food markets).

What I don't need/want is an artificial restriction based on religious beliefs of others, or a social experiment intended to encourage me to do other things with my time on Sundays.

There is something quite appealing about shops being shut every so often - if only to force the populace to 'snap out of it'!

Where things seem to have got extremely confused relates to the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose, etc in UK each of whom in recent years have pursued an aggressive expansion campaign via their Local/ Mini stores.  So whilst the large stores are forced to follow certain close down rules, the same companies' small stores (and staff!) have much more (or if you work for them less) flexibility.

I rather like the idea of this gap being addressed to provide all employees of the large retailers with the same T's & C's.

Peter

I popped into my local large John Lewis store today with regard to a recent purchase, and guess what? - on Bank Holiday Monday it was absolutely heaving with customers. I plead 'Guilty' as charged for being one of them.

A large Sainsburys store nearby was similarly busy. If shops are open - people come. It's that simple. Our forbears would be astonished at the shopping transition from 'necessity' to 'pastime'.

John.

I'd be more concerned about the high heels John's wearing in the picture Tony. 

I got caught out yesterday expecting to find my local garden centre to be open to buy some gas for the BBQ and found it to be closed. The BBQ tasted better using charcoal so nothing really lost there.

This topic comes up periodically ... every Christmas and Easter.

Religious sensibility was/is one strand of the 'Keep Sunday Special' campaign, but it was never about forcing religion down anybody's throat. And as regards the legislation that went through, the safeguards for those who didn't wish to work on Sundays for faith reasons has largely failed. Try getting a job in retail these days without being available on Sundays.

But the greater strand to 'Keep Sunday Special' as regards the majority who rarely or never attend Church, is that of having a (shared) day in the rhythm of the week that is different from the other six, a weekly day's holiday, for rest, family life, football, car boots or whatever (and, yes, Church for those who want to go), and where people weren't put under pressure. This can never be 100% of course because of the need of an infrastructure or framework of essential workers, but that is an accepted given.

That many Countries - e.g. many on the Continent - can manage perfectly well with not having shops open 24/7 shows that this facility isn't essential, people manage.  Britain is now intravenously connected to Sunday shopping, and I can't see a time that we will ever be disconnected. And as a society we're not the better for it, as we become more and more frenetic and more and more disconnected from one another.

For whoever we are, religious or not, I am thankful that there are still two days a year when we can't go shopping, so have to find something else to do. If we can't manage even 2 from 365 days a year, it just shows what junkies we are.

The famous poem 'Leisure' by WH Davies (1871-1940), 'super-tramp', is not religious in bent, but it sums up our inherent need for the weekly sabbatical:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

As a former retailer (of the year, twice, in London) and a publican (central London) MY experience is that changes in opening times has not resulted in any significant increase in turnover. When I owned shops I expected to achieve roughly 40 per cent of my weekly sales on Saturday; when the law changed to allow Sunday opening I achieved roughly 42-48 per cent of my weekly turnover over Sat and Sun so in no way did opening Sunday double my takings. Similarly when i used to have to close my pub on Sunday at 3pm till 6pm the frenzied "time please" splurge of doubles and twin rounds resulted in the same increase in takings that opening those extra three hours did but the extra wages and overheads negated the increase. 

A more important point iHMO is that the birth of Sunday opening coincided with the opening of the giant out of town supermarkets who offered convenience over quality and thus killed the high street retailers who made a community. Now, ironically, those same mega multiples are promoting their "in store butchers and bakers" as a return to quality Retailing. Erm, hello, that's what we had till you guys came along!

Retailing is both cyclical and innovative. When I started we used to tell mail order customers "Please allow 28 days for delivery". Can you imagine Amazon saying that now? I always smile when I hear people vilify Amazon as the destroyer of retailing. Amazon and it's like are merely  another stepping stone on the retailing cycle. As with the supermarkets who are now returning to a specialised approach to retailing so will customers eventually return to a more personalised approach to retailing and the retailing model will evolve. In a recession, price is the false king, as we emerge from recession service will prevail, as always. The baker that knows your name, the butcher that knows which cut you prefer, the garage that pumps your fuel for you. The circle turns. 

I think that's the most pertinent point so far Mick. Sunday should be officially renamed as family day. We can learn a lot from counties like Spain where a spirit of the family is still cherished. 

"I always smile when I hear people vilify Amazon as the destroyer of retailing. Amazon and it's like are merely  another stepping stone on the retailing cycle."

Which reminds me - there is a programme on BBC2 this evening about the rise and rise of the on-line retail giant.

John.

We have family in Italy and on a Sunday people dress up, get out the Sunday car and go for a meal with family and friends, or have people round. They don't all go to Asda because they are too unimaginative to think of anything else. I'm all for shutting the shops on a Sunday. 

I think a day off a week from 'the norm', be it consumerism, smurfing the net, over eating etc. is a good thing.

The fact that the shops are heaving with people spending money on a Sunday could simply be (is likely) an indication that a  lot of people are bored with their lives and shopping is both their entertainment and justification of being...

The older I get, the more I'm convinced more people should get a hobby, whether something 'hands on', or as simple as spending more time with each other, without shops and screens of any sort being involved...

No internet or TV or shopping on a Sunday then! Brilliant idea. I am serious!

ATB from George