German Stores and Sundays

For decades, there was a clear understanding about German store hours.  You could extend your hours on one evening a week....past the 6PM line.  For weekends, you typically opened around 8AM and were closed by 1PM.  German stores wanted flexibility and more hours.  Eventually, they got enough political folks lined up and got evening hours extended to 8PM...even on Saturday.

A strange thing happened then.....more shoppers came into stores....with more money spent by consumers.  More stores hired more employees along the way, and some traditional ideas about shopping in Germany were tossed.

There is this other rule about Sunday shopping.  There are exceptions arranged by most states now.....that a couple of occasions a year, you can actually open a German store at noon, and run it to 5PM.  Most cities and regions allow two such Sundays a year.  A funny thing was discovered about Sunday shopping....folks spend money.  So the stores in Germany are hyping up an attitude about more Sunday openings.

You can go from state to state, from city to city, and there are discussions under way.  Frankly, most employees aren't interested in more store openings....even if it meant more employees for the company and more profit.  The political folks are a bit hyper on this issue because they would like to keep public support on their side.

So when the topic of Sunday openings comes up with your German colleague.....there are these simple facts that you ought grasp quickly.  Germans don't shop on Sunday typically.....but if you offered them the opportunity, they'd quickly become like Americans....browsing and buying.  Germans will talk about Sunday being a day of rest, but frankly.....if they knew of some special sale going on at a electronics shop on a Sunday.....they'd drive over to check it out.  Finally, a German will try to lay out America's forty-four faults in society....with America's 24-hour a day shopping frenzy bringing us down a notch.  The humble truth here.....Germans would do the same thing, if you offered them the opportunity.  They'd secretly like to be as faulty as America, but they just don't want to admit it.