BERLIN -- It's a
Sunday afternoon, and the Potsdamer Platz shopping arcade looks
like any American shopping mall on a busy weekend. It's thronged
with parents pushing baby strollers, retirees eating ice-cream
cones and teenagers sneaking kisses.
But there is one
major difference. The mall has plenty of stores to draw shoppers
-- Foot Locker, H&M, Eddie Bauer, a discount supermarket and
more. But today, absolutely no one is going inside. There's a
reason for that: The stores are closed. By law, they have to be.
Any American merchant
would be writhing in agony at the sight of hordes of patrons who
are not allowed to buy. But in Germany, this abnormal spectacle
is entirely normal. Sunday may not be a day of worship in this
largely secular society, but due to government decree, it's not
a day of commerce either.
The only exceptions
in the mall are eating establishments. Being exempt from the law,
they stay busy serving people whose Euros are burning a hole in
their pockets. Oh, and there is one retail store open -- a small
shop stocked entirely with Berlin souvenirs. Under Germany's quirky
regulations, it may operate on Sundays because it caters to tourists.
Many Germans defend
the closing law as a way of limiting the pernicious reach of consumerism.
But don't think locals are immune to the need to shop just because
it's Sunday.
In fact, just a mile
away, at the Friedrichstrasse train station, customers are lined
up 12-deep at the registers, buying the groceries denied them
at Potsdamer Platz. It turns out the law has another gap, allowing
shops to operate in train stations seven days a week because they
allegedly accommodate the needs of travelers.
But the people carrying
out bags of groceries don't look as though they plan to take them
on a train to Prague or Warsaw. They look like they just couldn't
manage to get all their shopping done during the week.
Organized labor likes
the law because it grants workers a day of rest. Only some workers,
however, get the break. An army of establishments is allowed to
do business on Sundays -- including restaurants, museums, movie
theaters and gas stations.
At the state level,
additional peculiarities arise: Video stores are required to close
in Baden-Wurttemberg, but not in neighboring Rheinland-Pfalz,
so some residents of Mannheim go to next-door Ludwigshafen to
rent their DVDs. Car washes may stay open in some places but not
others.
The benefits of outlawing
such capitalist acts between consenting adults, to borrow a phrase
from the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, are not obvious.
It creates real inconveniences for anyone who suddenly needs something
-- and there is no escaping the fact that 14 percent of all unforeseen,
urgent needs arise on Sundays.
You may think it
would be a relief not to squander your Sunday on shopping. But
any relief is counteracted by the increased stress on other days.
On Saturdays, when stores must close by 8 p.m., groceries are
clogged with Germans making sure they have enough food to sustain
life until Monday morning. Instead of being allowed to spread
their weekend errands out over two days, they have to cram them
all into one.
This is also a weird
policy for a country chronically plagued by two ailments -- weak
consumer spending and high unemployment. Letting stores accommodate
buyers on Sunday -- or after 8 p.m. other days -- certainly couldn't
reduce consumption, and it might increase it.
After all, if you
have a sudden urge to share a bottle of wine or fly a kite on
Sunday afternoon, you probably won't go out and buy it on Monday
morning. Some consumer needs are fleeting, and the lost sales
are lost forever.
Employees who would
rather have Sundays off gain from the status quo. But a lot of
Germans don't have to worry about having to work on Sundays because
they don't have the privilege of working at all.
Asks Jeff Gedmin,
director of the Aspen Institute Berlin, "How can it be that
in 2006, with 19 percent unemployment in Berlin, you can't buy
a bottle of aspirin on Saturday night?" Liberalizing the
law would boost the demand for workers at a time when jobs are
pitifully scarce.
In the end, the law
exists not because so many Germans don't want to shop on Sundays
but because so many of them do. In a modern economy, there's something
wrong with a policy that bars shoppers and stores from doing business
when they find it mutually agreeable. Maybe it's time to give
that approach a rest.
Copyright
2006 Creators Syndicate
