To think it's time to abolish Sunday trading rules in England

I wish they would be abolished.

I frequently work Sundays and it's full on and in many different venues often a reasonable way from home. I'm tired and hungry and would love to pickup a snack from the supermarket to get me home.

No chance.

Definitely open all day like the other days! It’s so old fashioned & most other jobs keep going all weekend so why do retail staff need less time off than other professions?

They are in the villages - most shops shut at 1pm. Bigger towns and cities have open shops till 4-6pm.

Absolutely not - if anything I‘d quite like to see everything bar petrol stations and the odd corner shop closed. The poor staff having to work all days and all hours - our nearest Tesco shop is open till 11pm on a Sunday.

Restaurants and Cafés are open till 4/5pm - ample time to get your coffee in. If you miss that window just settle down at home or arrange your time in a way that allows you to have that coffee out earlier.

Your veiled jab at „the majority“ not being Christian sounds goady - many people of all faiths like to have one day off to spend with their family. It happens to be on a Sunday here in England - if you don’t like it then move somewhere else.

I agree. Pass by a supermarket between 5-7pm any weekday and you see how busy the car parks are. Many of these will be customers who have just finished work, which the smaller independent shops aren’t catering for because they seem to be stuck on opening 9-5 Monday - Friday. Seems to be the same across many towns in the UK. Can’t see how limiting the hours the supermarkets and larger shops are open on Sundays really makes much difference to the smaller shops.

The arguments along the lines of Sunday trading laws helping smaller businesses don’t stack up now. Not when you even have a Tesco Express even in villages, let alone pretty much every town, which is something we didn’t have until fairly recently. Plus many small, independent shops are closed on Sundays anyway!

If the smaller shops are offering something worthwhile to customers to visit and more importantly are actually available to customers, they’ll use them.

Up thread there's talk about protecting us from big businesses and supermarkets dominating the market.

As regards trading then I can understand you may not want restrictions on timings. However, we all need regulations in lots of areas relating to goods and employment and we can't trust all businesses to do this for themselves

I think you have misunderstood that I'm fine with that as long as it's a requirement for all parties and not just the one people don't agree with.

Who is being protected though? Several retail workers have confirmed on this thread that they still work a standard shift on a Sunday anyway; just not all of it on the shop floor.

I don’t want the government dictating what time I can or cannot use a business’s services either.

Just because you posted it, it doesn’t mean we all need to fall into line and agree with it.

You say it’s the government telling big stores when they can open rather than telling us when we can shop, but one begets the other. I also find it bizarre that you think one day of restricted trading a week is going to make that much of a difference to the power of big retailers.

Also, regulation is good. Do people really want business dictating their lives to them without any protection in law

That might be your culture / tradition but it isn’t everyone’s. It’s not all about you, either.

"The point is, why is 2026 do we need the government to tell us when we can and can’t go shopping?"

They're not telling us when we can go shopping, they're telling the big stores when they can open, to prevent them driving everyone else out of business and ending up as a cartel. I posted about this at 03:08 this morning.

As someone who worked retail for years, in both Scotland and England and including Sundays, I never particularly minded working Sunday shifts (they suited me well at the time) but I did find Sunday trading hours in England frustrating because it meant I was effectively losing a whole day to work but only getting paid for 6 hours as opposed to a full day's shift. Starting at 10 and finishing at 4 didn't really leave me with much time to actually enjoy the day once travel was factored in, but it also resulted in less pay than my other working days. Personally I think shops should either be open normal hours on a Sunday or just fully closed - the halfway house of Sunday trading isn't actually giving staff a chance to 'relax and enjoy the day'.

Why? Because you need butter at 8pm? Whats the point. I doubt there’s anything anyone needs urgently outside of trading hours that can’t be bought from a corner shop.

I always have to remember that Northern Ireland shops open really late on a Sunday.
I travel from the south, only 12 miles and find myself standing in empty M&S car park at 11am wondering where the fuck everyone is.

Why? Why does it affect you if they are open? You don’t have to go

People are arguing that supermarkets will struggle to find staff or that the same spend will just be spread over a longer time period - none of that is an argument for it being prevented by law.

It's an argument for the people advocating for change to give the practicalities even a smidgen of thought, though. Which unfortunately most haven't. The OP has entirely failed to.

At best, what we get is people who have assumed that because they want a service to exist, there must also be a supply of people who are ready and willing to perform it. On the basis of nothing at all.

Personally I'd have no principled objection to any of this if we had good reason to think it would work, but there's a big gap where that part is. Because there's potential for reform to make things worse not better, so people are entirely reasonable not to want legal change without any working out being shown.

In Western Australia, supermarkets are open 8am - 9pm M - F, 8am - 5pm Saturday and 11am - 5pm on Sundays. Sunday shopping was only introduced in 2012. I actually wish Sundays were closed.

I came here to say this too. As a former waitress, people always used to go on about how retail staff deserve the time off with their families so they can go out for a nice family meal....where I would be working also on minimum wage and never getting that guaranteed family time.

Especially when the source material provided, with which they are disagreeing, is from a questionnaire that has a response rate of circa 95% of the population and is pretty much the gold standard for data collection.

I think you have misunderstood how research works. When you’re the one making the claim, you’re the one who needs to back it up.

All the posters making comments like “But why do we neeeeeed more shopping hours, surely there’s already enough?”, “Why can’t people be more organised?” and “Shops weren’t open at all on Sunday when I was a kid - we managed!!” are all missing the point. The point is, why is 2026 do we need the government to tell us when we can and can’t go shopping? Why is this a legal issue instead of a business one?

Shops being able to open for longer doesn’t make it obligatory. People are arguing that supermarkets will struggle to find staff or that the same spend will just be spread over a longer time period - none of that is an argument for it being prevented by law. Individual businesses would still be able to tailor their hours according to customer demand, costs v profit etc., just as they do for the rest of the unrestricted week.

The big Tesco near me used to open 24 hours from Monday to Saturday. They started closing at 11 because, as online shopping grew in popularity, the demand for longer hours went down. Our Waitrose used to open at 8 and had two late opening nights - then they realised that since our local train station (just around the corner) had got an upgraded service, they were missing out on morning trade from passing commuters, so they ditched late opening and used the staff hours gained to open at 7.30 instead. There’s nothing to stop stores sticking to their current Sunday hours if the law changes.

I’m amused by the number of people wailing about staff deserving time off in one breath a then saying to just go to a convenience store or get an online delivery in the next. Who do you think staffs convenience stores? Who picks, packs and delivers your online orders? I also wonder if any of the people saying Sunday should be for lovely precious family time ever take their family to a restaurant or a pub or the cinema or bowling alley on a Sunday as part of that “together time”. They never seem particularly bothered about the staff in those places.

Yes, it was over 20 years ago that I cycled into the centre of Bremen from the suburbs on a Saturday afternoon to find it deserted with all shops and museums closed

Not that I'm aware! Or not in the area I live in anyway.

I think someone else upthread mentioned that they did close early Saturdays in the past, but not anymore.

They do still have A LOT of religious bank holidays where everything is shut too though.

When I worked shifts, being able to do a big shop in Tesco at 8.30pm on a Sunday would have been really handy.