Arguments in Favour of Sunday Shopping
Sunday shopping has its main argument in the consumer welfare. Extended opening hours afford more time to individuals in order to make their choices. They allow individuals to avoid peak shopping hours and having to queue in their free time.
Public authorities hurt consumers by keeping stores from choosing their opening hours according to their market presumptions of consumers' demand. According to OECD, demand has strongly evolved towards greater flexibility, also due to a greater diversity of working hours in the economy in general, as well as to a higher female labor participation in the labor market. Before the liberalization of shop opening hours in a country like Austria, for example, one could observe an increase in cross-border shopping towards countries with more liberal shopping hours.
Studies of liberalisations in North America and Europe suggest that Sunday shopping interdictions depress employment growth, harm prospective workers with non-traditional schedules, and may not protect consumers from price increases. Although research has confirmed the suspicion that larger outlets benefit to a greater extent from the liberalisation of shop-closing regulations than their smaller counterparts, such regulations serve only to protect the inefficiency of the latter, thereby harming consumers.
It hasn't been proven that Sunday shopping hurts retailers by leading all of them to open longer hours. Consumer preferences can point in the direction of an extension of shop opening hours in a given area without this need arising in another area. In Spain, for instance, where relatively few restrictions survive, retail stores are open an average of 46 hours per week. In Sweden, 15 years after liberalization, supply as regards shop opening hours has not yet standardized itself. On the contrary, if 80% of the department stores and supermarkets are open on Sunday, only half of corner shops and 48% of furniture stores are open on this day.
Final extension of opening hours, for each individual firm, will depend on:
- the price consumers are ready to pay for a 24/7 offer of certain products, as prices can rise due to higher wages for Sunday workers;
- the wage that workers will or can demand in order to work additional hours.
An economic model of free competition in prices and opening hours with free entry has shown that restrictions on opening hours aggravate a market failure: entry is excessive and opening hours are underprovided. The model predicts the impact of a liberalization of opening hours: in the short run prices will remain constant, but increase in the long run. Concentration in the retail sector will rise and opening hours will increase in two steps, immediately after deregulation and further over time. Finally, employment in the retail sector increases.
Campaigns for deregulation of Sunday shopping have been put forward mainly by liberal parties.
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