This backwards deciding-what's-best-for-everyone-else type thinking drives me insane. I'm from Perth, Western Australia, a city of ~1.6 million people, which:

This backwards deciding-what's-best-for-everyone-else type thinking drives me insane. I'm from Perth, Western Australia, a city of ~1.6 million people, which: 1. only allowed retail shops to open on Sunday in _2012_; and 2. only allowed retail shops to open past 6pm on weeknights in _2010_; Over the years there have been numerous debates and even referenda about this. The same arguments kept coming out: - what about "family" time? - what about the poor small businss? I've always been on the side of the fence where consumers have some pretty broad rights here. Up until 5 years ago, if you worked office hours the only time you could get to a supermarket was Thursday night (late night shopping until 9pm) or on a Saturday. That's pretty darn inconvenient. I had an educated, single (at the time) flatmate once tell me "it's not that hard for me to go to the shops in the morning and go to work a bit later" to which my response was "well, that's nice for you. Not everyone has that luxury". The article here mentions the defeat of such laws in the state of New York due to numerous exceptions. This had happened in Perth as well: - "independent" shops were allowed greater trading hours, including on Sundays. This meant that IGA, a chain of affiliated "independent" supermarkets were typically open 7 days while the big chains (Coles, Woolworths) were not. - Bunnings (equivalent to Home Depot) was allowed to open whenever they wanted. It was probably too unpopular to do otherwise; - to artificially bolster failing street retail, two zones were established that were allowed to trade on Sundays (in the Perth city center and Fremantle). Additionally they had late night trading on Fridays instead of Thursdays. - alcohol as a general rule is sold in a much more limited range of stores in Australia. Corner delis, even supermarkets are not allowed to sell it. You need a retail liquor license, which is fairly strictly controlled and can be worth a lot of money. "Hotels" (in this context meaning venues that were typically once hotels but aren't any more) had 7 day liquor licenses for a drive-in bottle shops (you can literally drive in and buy a carton of beer through your car window) that were allowed to trade 7 days. Other liquor shops could not trade on Sundays. The value of this was so pronounced that the large supermarket chains would pay millions to buy some of these hotels just for the 7 day retail liquor license. It's maddening. The article mentions Germany. Switzerland has this too. The airports and bigger train stations have extended hours so it's not unusual to see people going to the airport on a Sunday to buy groceries (Swiss law may have changed in the last 5+ years; it's been awhile since I've been).