3 ms·

Traveling families and busy 'essential workers' need food, gas, and basic necessities. Access to quick food (McDonalds in this case), gas stations, and convenie

• yreg 5y ago
  >Convenience stores are as vital as anything! How come it is illegal to keep them open during public holidays in much of Europe then? I find hospitals a tad more important.
• NoSorryCannot 5y ago
  _Just_ as vital? If you had to choose between closing a hospital or a McDonald's, you would choose at random? I hear what you are saying. Gas stations are vital transitively from the vital jobs that require gas, such as ambulance services. But I could still rank them as less vital than the services themselves, enabling me to at least close some gas stations. Fast food would be far down the list because it is predictable and trivial to plan around.
• shusaku 5y ago
  Here in Japan, people I’ve talked to will say that decades ago around New Years, everything was closed for days. No super markets. No restaurants. Not even ATMs. The downside is it requires a lot of prep work pre-holiday (i.e. packing sandwiches instead of fast food). I think we can do without a lot more than what we think, but the burden is shifted to the consumer instead of the worker, so without a strong culture of shared holidays you’ll see more and more people at work.
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    The same was/is true in China around Chinese New Years. It is still pretty bad, things might be shutdown completely for a couple of days and mostly for a week or even two. It can take some real planning to figure out how to deal with that first week.