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

Monday to Friday in retail 😂

We new coffee shop in my town - it’s open until 10/11pm and I often walk past at 8/9 and it’s busy.

no, yabu
let the staff go home

Leave it as it is.

We are still in work Sundays before and after the store is open so the argument of limiting hours that people can work is rubbish.

As it stands now everyone loves it when we close early because we can get more done, I can guarantee that people would opt out of Sundays if we traded for longer.

It's not just shops, though, is it.

When you work all week during core hours and need access to a service, having to cramp it into an often heavily busy and shutting early that day Saturday only makes it very difficult to fit appointments around work.

Half a day a week to get to the optician's, the library, an estate agent's etc. just isn't enough time.

The flip side of this, of course, is the lack of childcare on a weekend. If we want more workers to be available all weekend, there has to be flexibility with nurseries, childminders and schools that just won't work with the current system.

I don't have an answer, but I sympathise with the OP. I cannot take calls at work, so all my life admin happens on a Saturday morning or during AL.

I actually miss having one day a week when shops aren’t open. It used to mean there was a day when you just chilled.

I think shops should be shut on a Sunday. Let people be with their families

nothing is usually so urgent it can’t wait a day or if you knew would be shut be more organised and buy bread milk cheese etc day before

same with 25/26 Dec and bank holidays

possibly with odd chemist open am/pm so on a rota

What a load of nonsense. All it has meant is the big retailers have all opened mini branches everywhere. Where I live there is a massive Sainsbury's and a mini one about 100 yards away that opens early on a Sunday.

Not necessarily disorganised. I used to do 'on call' for a week at a time in a cardiology department.

My longest day started with me being called in at 5.00, then working a normal day followed by late cases meaning I left at 23.00.

I did used to put a couple of ready meals in the fridge in case I didn't have time to cook.

Are other posters also up late in the UK, or are these friends from across the pond?

I don't see why we can't have both.

Exactly. And the inverse is that some people want to pick up more work hours at the weekend while their partner is at home and they have child care.

Ok, let us bring back Norman rule.

Actually loads of pubs are family friendly friendly. Most pubs aren’t rowdy. If you want cafe culture live in France.

Why do we want a cafe culture, go live in France8f you want a cafe culture.if you want a sociable drink inc coffee, do the British thing and go to a pub

All the comments so far seem to believe that the Sunday Trading Hours are to do with Church - they're really not. Not since 1994, anyway.

Before 1994 shops just couldn't open on Sundays, at all. That was probably because of the Church. When the 1994 Act came in, big shops had their hours restricted and little shops didn't. This was because the big supermarkets were already putting little shops out of business - they had the economy of scale and could undercut the small retailers.

It was felt then that the big supermarkets were well on their way to being an oligopoly (like a monopoly, but spread between a small number of players); and that if they were allowed to drive all their smaller competitors and completely control the market, it gave them too much power. They were already in a position to be 'price makers' and not 'price takers' - meaning that they told suppliers how much they would pay for their goods, rather than suppliers telling the supermarkets how much they would charge them for their goods. If you can force e.g. farmers to sell you their milk at below what it costs them to produce, when you've got 60% of the market - what can you do if you control 100% of the market? It also opens up the possibility of collusion, where all members of the oligopoly watch each other's prices and when one puts their prices up, so do the rest. Effectively, choosing not to compete any more, because they can all make more profit that way - together.

So that's why, in loosening Sunday trading hours, big retailers still had restrictions beyond the small retailers. Because if they didn't, they'd drive all the small retailers out of business, dominate the supply chain, control the market by operating an oligopoly, and be able to charge us whatever they damned well pleased, and we customers wouldn't be able to do a thing about it because there'd be no-one else to buy from.

So, no - these laws are not 'old-fashioned' and 'inconvenient' - they are what keeps the big retailers in check and competing on price with each other.

In England it is the large chain stores and supermarkets who look upon restrictive sunday hours as "lost" trading time. However I believe it is a fallacy to believe they would sell more goods overall with longer trading hours. There is only a certain amount of money available for discretionary spending. So the result is that the same amount of trading would take place but just over longer hours.

Being able to open for longer hours on sundays, bank holidays (especilly the christmas period) is one of the few advantages which smaller shops have over the big retailers. Its they who would mainly suffer if the laws were liberalised.

I don't understand what you mean by a normal week?

Surely for many people a normal week means work/school Monday to Friday, shopping and other jobs on Saturday and Sunday as a day to take it easy, go out,spend time with family etc. Other people have a different shape to their week and that is what they call normal.

Or by "normal week" do you mean no difference between the days at all. Personally I wouldn't like that as I think it is nice to have some days that are different.

Shops open later and every day of the week is one of the reasons I love living in Japan! I don't understand why many clothes shops for example in England seem to be open from about 9:30 to 17:30. No wonder the high street is dying. Here it's more like 10:30 to 20:00 and there's barely a boarded up shop around me. Some indie restaurants or more specialist shops will close midweek, which makes more sense than closing one day of the weekend.

I went to Wurtzberg in Germany a couple of years ago to visit a friend in January. We had no idea it was Epiphany weekend. Everything was shut. It sucked. The worst thing was that the water in the hotel was rank tasting and there wasn't even a kettle to make a cuppa to mask it. No convenience stores, not even a Spar. We ended up buying bottled water from a kebab shop.

But the people serving others aren't able to if they're working. We would do well, as a society, to look outward and not always from our selfish perspective.

When I was a kid you could buy almost nothing on a sunday. Shops, cinemas, cafes and everything were closed. Sunday was for church and visiting. One day the fuse in the electricity meter went. The local shop would not sell fuse wire to my mother so she could fix it and cook the dinner. Even though she begged the woman said she was sorry but if someone snitched she would get into trouble. A little later the shop woman came to the back door with a card of fuse wire. She told my mother that she could not sell it on a sunday but there was no law to say she could not give it away. That was how people were in the 50s.

I was thinking the same about Switzerland

Have just read you’re in Scotland. So this has absolutely no effect on you at all.
Bizarre.

If we shut for siesta, we would be prepping for climate change and likely would encourage a café culture.

Some Christian sects keep their Sabbath from Friday evening to Saturday evening, anyway.

Should go back to shops closing on a Sunday and half day on a Wednesday.
If anything, having the option to buy everything online should make life easier. We don’t need everything open all of the time.