I hate Sundays in Germany

So once again, why allow bars to open on sunday? Because getting shitfaced doesn't exactly seem to me as vaguely constructive (but it is fun).

Oh, wow... I just got this weird echo of Karl Marx!

Being drunk helps to:

- Socialize
- Make kids
- Let out our anger
- Get the B12 vitamin from the (weizen) beer.
- Release out artistic inner
- etc

You should get the hearing aid repaired!

And eating well helps you

- live
- be healthier, causing less of a strain on the health care system
- get the energy for all the sunday activities you want to do that the evil grocery stores stop you from doing on monday-saturday
- etc

I agree eating and getting pissed are both vital parts of lives, I'm just confused as to why the latter is facilitated on Sundays but the former inhibited (In less of course you want to do it an a Restaraunt or Gas Station store, both of which are generally more unhealthy and expensive than buying real groceries and preparing food yourself).

Now, I agree, you could have perfect foresight and always have your kitchen pre-stocked, just like you could buy beer before hand and have dirnks and socialize with your friends at home. If sunday opening is so evil and causes noise and a march to a free market nightmare, why do you allow restaraunt and bar workers to be exploited?

If it feels good do it.

True, true.

Wouldn't that be the whole objective of opening them?

Sorry STB, but 'Wow'!!

EDIT: I hope that was humor!

No, and if you'd managed to read the rest of my post you'd see why. People want to do a lot of things that, for the greater good of society, are in fact not allowed, like murder or drilling holes on a Sunday.

Oh, great... now we're progressing to Lenin. I think I'll go away before Stalin shows up.

Are you from the Ukraine you reactionary running dog?

I don't think this idea is either socialist or controversial. The German government has decided it is in society's interest that we be prohibited from killing each other, and they've also decided that Sunday opening is not in society's best interests. Whether you agree with their conclusion or not is irrelevant; the reason it's banned remains.

Not really. Foreigners are here to teach Germans how to run Germany

You know what else the German government once decided was not in societies best interest?

(sorry, that was like a slow pitch right down the middle of the plate for a Godwin.)

@Krieg - Well many, many Germans who don't even live in or pay taxes in America have no problem voicing their opinions of what is wrong domestically (foreign policy affects everyone so different can of worms) in America (many of which I even agree on). So I don't feel too guilty about having an opinion of things that annoy me in the country where I reside and the government I fork over half my paycheck to.

So selling groceries on Sundays can now be equated with murder.

It's all so clear now...

Prague has shops open on Sunday, 24 hour Tesco's and other excellent supermarkets like Carrefour and society hasn't collapsed there, in fact it's fabulous. Why am I living here again?

In the Czech Republic and Slovakia there are shops open on Sunday.

The odd corner shop in each town called a Vercerka ("Evening Shop") that sells convenience stuff at higher prices.
Similar in size and concept to a kiosk or a petrol station shop in Germany.

And the big chain stores, Billa and Tesco.

Sorry, not your country, but please continue paying taxes.

Sundays in Germany are rubbish. Apparently that country had an "economic mirale" in the 60s. It truly was a miracle if they only open their shops for a fraction of the time that other European countries do.

Actually I think Sunday being a quiet day is great. Not because of any religious reasoning, just because it's one day when a whole family can meet up. Or a bunch of friends/family can all go out to a beer garden on the day they know everybody has off. If shops and such were open on Sunday you'd end up using them and end up being busy doing crap on a Sunday too, however as it is now you have one day where you just have to relax, before going back to work on Monday.

If you can't really find the time to get stuff during the week or on Saturday you either must not actually want it that badly or you should really question whether it's the shops that should change their hours or you should change your lifestyle. If given a store that opens at 8 and closes at 8 you have 72 hours in which you could go to the shop during the week? The Real near me is open for an extra seven hours on top of that. If you do the math it comes out that I have a shop open near me 47 percent of the time. Given that I sleep usually from about 2 to 8 their is a store open near me 57 percent of the time if I slept a bit more normal hours it would be seventy percent of the time their being a store open just down the road. Which is including the fact that the stores are closed on Sundays!

I personally think this is a small price to pay for having one day that you know you can spend with your family or significant other.

i feel so sorry for you that you would feel compelled to go shopping just because the shops were open , or that your family or friends could not function together as they normally do just because the shops are
open.
so next time your sitting down for a nice quiet sunday beer in a beergarden ( in a business that is open on a sunday , and luckily because it suits your needs where as the others do not so they should be closed) just remember
that everybody at the table is only there because the shops are not open and thaey have nothing better to do so they hang out with you .

um not quite, I do manage to see people outside of sunday. However it is nice to have one day where you can just relax with friends and family and not have to worry about shops being open and having to run errands. Remember people have to work in those shops for them to be open and some of those people may be friends or family and then they can't do the spending time with friends and family.

I remember one christmas I spent with a gf a while back and her little brother got a ps2 and also some games for christmas and as luck would have it the damn thing was broken. Of course he got his hopes up and was naturally disappointed by the whole incident, when I came up with the idea of phoning blockbuster to see if they were open and we could rent one so that he could try out his games and use a ps2 until the shops opened again and they could exchange it. Lone behold 12 o'clock on christmas day Blockbuster was open, so we trekked on up and rented a ps2 from blockbuster. Up until this point everything is peachy, customer service, convenience and store is open when I want my random thing at my random time.

The down side to the story was the girl behind the counter that we rented the movie from was sixteen and her mother brought her christmas dinner by as we were renting the bloody thing. Now you may argue that families only get together for christmas because they have nothing better to do because all the shops are closed or you could argue that it is very nice that all the shops are closed so families can spend christmas together.

I know that it's a rather extreme case, but it kinda made it clear. We need a balance b/w being able to shop and being able to spend quality time enjoying life. Back in Canada it was hard to spend time with friends because we all worked such fucked up hours. Basically as I see it you always need something from the shop and you always have errands you have to run, but it's really nice to have one day a week were everybody gets the opportunity to unwind.

on the other hand i know shitloads of ppl who would kill for the xtra shift every week

They could always get a job in a pub or restaurant if they wanted/needed more money couldn't they. 400 euro job and they don't even have to pay tax on it.

What a bloomin' hypocrite! Hasn't it occurred to you that perhaps the people working in the beer garden would also appreciate a nice Sunday with friends and family? You go out and make them busy doing crap on a Sunday which is completely unnecessary. If you want a nice beer with some friends, there's plenty of time during the week to go buy a case or two and invite folks to your place. Jesus almighty, can't you get your life organised better so that you don't have to go forcing other people to bring you beer that you are fully capable of getting yourself?

_{(sound familiar?)}

addon: and would you really force members of a family who own a little shop to go work in a pub to make a little money instead of opening up their own store if they felt there was enough demand? Very logical...

Oh I have enough beers in my keller trust me on that one. You did read the part about finding a balance. If you take a job at a beergarden, pub, or restaurant you are signing up for odd hours. Their are other benefits though, like being able to do the job while you study.

edit addon: If you allow the shops to be open whenever they want little family run stores have to try and compete with the big chains who hire employees at shit rates. If you take america as a great example of this in action. Family run stores can't compete and generally end up closing. Leaving the family that once owned a prosperous little family store to work in wall mart for five bucks an hour..

Yep... and folks applying for a 24/7 variety store in Toronto also know that they are possibly signing up for nights and/or weekends. No difference at all. So what's the problem if a store advertises for folks who want to work the cash register on a Sunday, gets applicants, picks one or two and hires them?

The dynamics of village stores doesn't actually work that way. In my in-law's village, the little store is only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays and has no intention of opening even 5 days a week, let alone 6 or 7. The owner only wants to work 2 days a week, so that's how she runs her business. She chose her own opening hours, and I see no way that she'd change her mind if Sunday shopping were to be wide open.

Sure you can use that argument, however it goes beyond the people who apply to work the sunday shift at the gas station/convenience store doesn't it. Because then people who didn't apply wanting to work on a sunday or from 10 till six in the morning end up having to work those shifts because the boss says take the shifts or shove it.

But we aren't just talking about village stores are we.

Then regulate the working hours instead of the physical premises' opening hours. Makes much more sense to me.

so you go from the government telling you when your workers can work for you instead of when you can open your shop? Please do expand upon this please.

The government already tells me how long my workers can work for me. But why is the government also telling me how long I can work for myself? That is the real question that needs to be answered. If I work as a programmer from my home office, or in marketing, or online sales, or as a self-employed accountant, or farmer, or photographer, or independent journalist, then I can work as many hours as I please. But if I want to sell items from my own shop, then the government limits me in how long I can work.

If I specifically look for people to work in my shop for me on a Sunday, as a part-time job, and we come to a mutual agreement on working hours, then how is that wrong? Or what if I work the weekends myself with family members, and have workers only doing Mon-Fri? And remember that this is Germany, where a woman can choose to come back from maternity leave to her old job after a few years and choose to only work 33% of the time, and the employer must find someone else to do the other 66% of her job. So German employers are already used to having all sorts of restrictions, like keeping that job open for a few years just in case the woman might decide that she wants it back. So it would be no big deal to add a clause saying that workers who weren't specifically hired for Sunday jobs may refuse to work on Sunday. Better yet, make it true equality of religion, and let Moslems take off Fridays, and Jews take off Saturday. The atheists will be happy with any day of the week.

Have I expanded enough for ya?

lets compare everything with america.
because everybody else in the world
is going to make the same mistakes as
them so they should even get a chance.
.
and while we are comparing i love to get the sunday shifts back home 1.5 x normal rates 2 x on public holidays
monday off and i can go to the post office and do shit i cannot do in normal business hours coz im working

I think you are right, there was a radio poll done last year, it's on one of the other sunday-shopping threads.
if shops were open EVERY sunday would they really be busy each time? the odd sundays I've popped to IKEA I've not noticed them busier than a typical saturday when they are usually bursting!

My brother was over here on a visit from UK recently and he commented how Sunday in Germany seemed so retro 1980s. Everyone walking around amongst the shops - which were all closed! Think of the money they could be making if they were open.

Absolutely; the amount of disposable income avialble in the economy is limited only by the number of hours that the shops are open.

You know, if you planned your life better and used one of the other 72 hours a week that the shops were open, then you could simply not go shopping on Sunday despite them being open. As far as I'm aware, attending shops on a Sunday isn't compulsory, even if you believe in reli.. capitalism.

Family stores can't compete because they have a smaller selection of products at higher prices because they don't buy in huge quantities from regional distributers. Paying some high school kid to man a register one more day of the week is not the reason they are failing.

And as someone pointed out earlier, I don't even see any family run grocers in Hamburg.

If it weren't for weekends being open in NZ when I was at Uni, there's no way I could've had a life, it was the only time I could earn any money to do anything.

But the economy isnt a zero-sum game. More economic activity means money circulating more intensively, which means more jobs, more prosperity. In economics this is called the multiplier effect. If you keep shops closed, prevent jobs from being created, and we all stay at home then you have less prosperity.

Wow. The total sum or arguments against opening shops on Sunday in this thread seems to be "organise your life better". The laws here remind me of when I was young back in the UK. We were told how to live our lives; weekdays were school, Saturdays was shopping, Sunday was family day. Fine.

However my generation and the one after mine don't give a flying crap about "standard weeks" or "family time". We'll take the family time when we can, any day of the week that ends with "day" - and it is better for it. Sunday = any other day. I can work, play, shop or sit around on my arse if I want.

Its just a continuance of Sunday = Special = Religious. I am not Religious, therefore Sunday not = Special not = Religious. And I get tired of the church trying to organise my life for me (as I am perfectly able to do it myself; even if it seems semi-random it isn't).

Those who want to sit around doing nothing on Sunday, sit around. Those who want to earn cash or do something like shopping, let them do it.

Thats dangerous talk, the state knows how you should best spend your time. Move along, citizen.

I actually don't see how a 20 minute trip to the shops out of a day to quickly buy some dinner out of the 16 hours I'm awake for constitutes "ruining" my Sunday.

You might as well tell me that my morning shit means I can't spend the rest of the day in the beer garden...

Yeah, but you'd end up doing it anyway wouldn't you? Not that you have any more disposable income to spend, so your not actually spending more are you?


Well I don't know about Hamburg, they may have already lost all their family stores. However around here I can go to several family run shops, butchers, cheese shops, green grocers, bakers and my favourite a fab little tea shop. The great thing about these stores is you can request things. Say I want some fresh cilantro, I can pop down to the family grocery store and ask if they could order me some and the next day I have cilantro. Oddly enough the selection is great, unlike the huge grocery stores.

They can compete however their profit margins are tighter, which is why having to run the shop and pay a couple of people to work their an extra day of the week, when no extra money is coming in. It can make the difference b/w surviving and going under for these small shops.

And how did they lose them if there's no Sunday shopping there?

You think Sunday Openings are the only thing effecting little family run stores. Common Hazza.

Edit: It might also be the person just hasn't bothered to find a family run shop in Hamburg.

Well if these stores quality is so much better then one more day aint going to kill them. Actually it should be easier for the mom and pop stores to survive here because the chain grocers are such shit in this country (you know whats better than being able to special order fresh cilantro, having it stocked every day ). Besides noone is forcing them to open on Sunday - shit my favorite cajun meat market/butcher back home in the states is open 4 days a week and they make a killing because *shock* they sell a high quality product. The government doesn't need to prevent me from buying toothpaste on a sunday to protect incompetent individual businessmen.

Well I already said that as a compromise, you could allow only small, independent "corner shops" to open on Sundays. Then we'd be able to buy stuff, plus the small shops would gain an advantage over the larger chains.

...except I wouldn't be able to, because there aren't any small independent retailers where I live

What exactly are we trying to save???

Germans do not want Sunday Shopping and in case you forgot, we are in Germany.

Nobody cares what you think/want, we are a minority.

yes but it's easier to go to a grocers were you can talk to the owner and get him to get things in for you of which their is no demand. Try going down to Real and asking them to order something like that in for you. Not a fucking chance, but people still go their and do the majority of their shopping because it's a one stop, big parking lot, fill a huge cart with garbage, easy choice.