We would be preparing for the great bread and milk shortage due to shops being closed for the whole of Christmas and New Years

*Maybe not the whole year but a week give or take a second.

Mothers would be filling the freezer, fathers would be storing petrol and children would tell each other stories of when they had a working set of batteries. A silence would fall across the land. Not a checkout till would be heard and familys would actually be seen in public with each other.

Do we really need shops to be open so often and for so long.

I miss half day Wednesday closing as well 🙁

Old person grumble over

Yes, so I don’t have to shop at the same time as grumpy old people.

Cheeky young pup

I also think we’re losing a lot as we focus on consumption and what we can get rather than what we can give – so much seems to be focussed around shopping these days rather than actually spending in time in proper social contact or doing interesting things.

Re consumerism…I remember in the late 80s when people were moaning about how shopping was becoming a leisure pursuit and 30 years later we’re in a debt crisis, effectively bust (not that government’s admitting this) because we’ve just shopped and shopped and shopped, mainly on debt, without thinking for a second of the consequences.
I think the future is much grimmer than people realise, as a direct result of the weight of the debt we’re in…

Moan over…

I don’t think we’ve gone far enough: Sunday early closing is very annoying for grocery shopping.

Beth misses half day closing too. Not me though. I miss trip hop.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6JTjhWUUyI[/video]

I can remember when, if Christmas fell on a weekend, shops would be closed from Friday afternoon until Wednesdsy morning.

It’s a wonder we didn’t all die of starvation.

Old person grumble? I was expecting this thread to be about vintage Razzle and the disappearance of hedge porn

Yes its a sign of the times that shopping is a leisure activity. OP you could mkve to France where hardly anything is open on Sundays and shops close for 1 or 2 hours every lunchtime.

binners – not from Mrs Fry, Shirley?

Anyway, even old people can surf the distant shores of the internet, without getting out of their chairs.

Boxing day was nice, everyone went for a walk because nowhere was open.

I can remember when, if Christmas fell on a weekend, shops would be closed from Friday afternoon until Wednesdsy morning

I can remember when, if Christmas fell on a weekend, we’d all be back at work on Monday

For the first time in many years our train company are runningtrains on boxing day, most multiple retailers are open till lateish crimbo eve shut crimbo day and back open boxing day , what happened to shutting for 4 or 5 days, giving the staff a chance to have descent family arguments,etc.

Used to work for a major logistics operation, that involved working Christmas Day.

It was brilliant. By far and away the healthiest Christmas experience I’ve ever had. Better than wasting a day with nothing to do but drink your way through the crap on tv eating stupid amounts of food or having to deal with relatives you don’t actually like.

I’d go for a good run before work, but still have time for a beer and a blether with my close family after work.

There was the perennial suggestion a few weeks ago that Sunday hours should be scrapped and shops to open earlier and close later. Some retailers in support and some not.

What amuses me about this olde chestnut is that there is a finite amount of money available, even taking credit into account, which means that the same spending is spread over more hours available. Given that increased costs to staff shops, heat, light etc will then reduce margins, which inevitably will place upward pressure on prices, which in turn means that people need to work longer hours to afford the price increases…

Ad infinitum. Good game this consumerism eh?

One of the things I like about visiting London is there are parts of the city that properly close on a Sunday, I really enjoy a wander in places that are shut down and quiet. I think its a throw back to my skateboarder youth when sundays gave you a run of a town and you had the shopping centres and multistories as your playground. The only other place you really get that shutdown is the Hebrides but there you fell a really tangible sense of people being trapped by the shutdown rather than freed by it.

Recently the only chance I get to enjoy that shut-ness is for a few years I’d spend a good chunk of christmas day on the road – I’d have Christmas breakfast with my GF and Christmas Dinner with my folks 200 miles away. When I first started doing that I’d have the M74 and the M6 pretty much to myself. Deserted roads and deserted service stations.

Stopped at one and inexplicably it has a coach load of Japanese Tourists in it, seemingly on some sort of sight seeing excursion but everywhere was shut, so they’d been decanted into the filling station to mill about and were taking pictures of the petrol pumps.

But on the more recent trips I seem to have had a lot more company

I remember when…. Christmas wasn’t all that and lots of businesses treated it as a normal day. New Year though…

Imagine if you don’t give a shit about Christmas and get forced to take a heap of time of work and have to deal with all the crap that goes with it.

What amuses me about this olde chestnut is that there is a finite amount of money available,

ah but… since we began seeing credit as money, rather than debt (c early 1990s) people have forgotten this entirely – and are under the illusion that there is not a finite amount of money, so long as you ‘can afford the repayments’. How many times have you heard people say this about house prices ‘they’re high but so long as the monthly payments are affordable, that’s ok’. Well it is if you’re happy paying tens of thousands of pounds more in interest over 25 years!

Which is why we’re in a debt crisis. The debt has to be paid off eventually, from future earnings.

I remember when…. Christmas wasn’t all that and lots of businesses treated it as a normal day.

Are you Victorian Dad?

My work doesn’t respect weekends so I find it very frustrating that the shops are closed at 4pm on a Sunday as I can’t get groceries after work on a Sunday.

I wonder the proportion of the UK workforce who work a ‘standard’ mon-fri 9-5. Having always done shift work I’ve always found the weekend-centric thing odd. Or is that just I’m annoyed at 20 years of missing parties, sports events etc etc

😆

Nah- Scottish Dad. Christmas Day only became a public holiday in 1958 and lots of businesses (and people) took a while to adapt. Christmas just wasn’t a big deal. Boxing Day only became a public holiday in 1974.

This is the reason I loved living in Spain – xmas is nothing. A token purely for the fact that “he” was supposedly born on that day.
The “12 days” is utter tosh – Jan 6th is Reyes – the day the Kings arrived to give the gifts to the little git. Coincidentally 12 days after he was born…
Kings day is the day celebrated there with early closing on the 5th.
Early closing on the 31st dec too and nothing – I mean nothing is open on the 1st Jan. Well the typical brit bars will be to feed the brits than want Skeggy in the sun and woe betide anyone that won’t give them their fryup.

As for shops normally though – just what is with closing late on a saturday evening to then open on a sunday at 10am to just close early?
Either close period or open 24hrs like every other day of the week.
It really is stupid for those that have work, journeys, kids to drop off, etc to be unable to get stuff they need because of the size of their local supermarket dictating whether it is open or not.
Either none open or they ALL open – s’not hard now is it…

I’ve heard my dad talking about having to work Christmas day, but used to get 2 days of for new year. As mr routes says, Christmas just wasn’t a holiday, whereas new year was, which is why the official Scottish holidays still have 2 days of at new year.

Didn’t England only used to get Christmas, and work new year?

When I used to do shift work, the only time the labs were closed completely was Christmas Day and NYD and if one of those days fell in your normal shift you’d have to take a day’s holiday for it, it certainly wasn’t given!
We did used to “self-time” the NYE shift to start at 7am and finish at 7.30pm instead of the usual 8am – 8.30pm shift time but even that stopped when management introduced the auto-clocking system which then reported us all for leaving an hour early. 🙄

Back in my school days I did a few months of shelf-stacking in Sainsbury’s – back then they closed at about 5pm on Christmas Eve. Come 4.45, they were announcing that the shop would be closing and there were still people running round the aisles grabbing pints and pints of milk, 8 loaves of bread (to last them all them way through til 10am on Boxing Day) and fighting over the last turkey in the freezer. Chaos! Hilarious too. 🙂