Only a crazy country is closed for business on THREE days around Christmas: Germany

While I'm taking a short break from business per se, this is still a busy Christmas for me as I launched three new websites (ai fray, games fray, ip fray) on Saturday.

Yesterday (Sunday, December 24), I went grocery shopping at the 家乐福 at the Centre Commercial in Fontvieille (Monaco). As I was waiting in line before they opened, it crossed my mind how lucky I was not to have to spend this Christmas in that self-delusional country in decline as I called Germany in a previous article. There's any number of reasons for my preference, starting with the better weather in the Principality. But this year it also meant that I had the flexibility to buy groceries until 6 PM on Sunday (if I had wanted to sleep in) and again at 8 AM on Tuesday--instead of not having that option between Saturday evening and Wednesday morning, i.e., effectively 3.5 days.

Being closed for business for well over 3 days (which leads people living in certain regions to cross the border just for grocery shopping) is just what the only G7 economy to be shrinking needs, right?

Germany is generally the laughing stock of many foreigners for the fact that shops are closed on Sundays. In the U.S., that is unthinkable except for negligibly small pockets. In Europe, it makes Germany one of only a handful of countries--and I can see that the country I now visit more often than any other, Austria, is on that list though it actually offers considerably greater flexibility than Germany. While Germany allows only the shops at airports and a very few major railroad stations to open on Sundays, there actually are supermarkets (such as of the Billa chain) in various other locations that do so. In many other ways, too, Austria has rules that are somewhat similar to Germany's, yet not that stupid.

I'm well aware of the fact that Christmas shopping opportunities are limited even in the highly deregulated United States. But what they do in the U.S. is that many stores (voluntarily) close in the early evening on Christmas Eve (24th), all day on Christmas Day (25th), and it's all back to normal come the morning of the 26th. That is precisely how it works here in Monaco, too. And just across the border (in France).

But in Germany, a country whose citizens face a major hassle when they want to drop off recyclable material and sends a postcard to the vast majority of them to have them report their electricity consumption, politicians have for a long time not cared about competitiveness and consumer welfare. To them, to the country's political media and to a significant part of the electorate, other topics are more important. They try to save the world instead of having a better life. As a result, their rules and their infrastructure are comparably archaic.

That means shops are closed on Sundays, and Christmas spans two consecutive national holidays: both the 25th and the 26th. If the 24th is not a Sunday, shops must close in the afternoon.

So let's look at how many hours shops are closed for in the seven different scenarios. There may be slight regional differences, and some retailers may elect to close even earlier, but I'll base this now on the scenario in Munich, where shops typically close on the 24th (unless it's a Sunday) at 4 PM, on a normal business day close at 8 PM, and open on a normal business day at 8 AM:

1. The 24th is a Monday: After a full day where shops are closed (Sunday), consumers get only a shortened day followed by two holidays. Shops are, therefore, closed for 64 hours in a row. Another way to look at it, though, is that they are closed for 100 of the 108 hours between Saturday evening and Wednesday morning.
2. Tuesday: After a full shopping day on Monday, stores close early on Tuesday and reopen 64 hours later on Friday. People have two full shopping days (Friday and Saturday) before Sunday. That will be the case in 2024 (but not for me as I won't ever live in Germany again).
3. Wednesday: same 64-hour period as in the Tuesday scenario, but less convenient as stores are crowded on Saturday, the only shopping day between Christmas and Sunday.
4. Thursday the 24th is the worst-case scenario: shops close early on Thursday and are then closed for three days in a row (Friday and Saturday for Christmas, Sunday because Germany is stupid every week of the year). They reopen on Monday morning--after 88 hours!
5. Friday: shops close early on Friday, are then closed for two full days in a row (Saturday and Sunday), and reopen on Monday after 64 hours. The reason Friday the 24th works so much better than Thursday the 24th is that the second Christmas holiday coincides with a Sunday.
6. Saturday has the same effect as Friday the 24th (64 hours), except that it's the first--not the second--Christmas holiday that falls on a Sunday.
7. Sunday the 24th was/is the case in 2023 and the scenario I described at the outset of this article. Shops are closed for 84 hours, the second-worst case.

To sum it up, in one out of seven years shops are closed there for 88 hours, in another one for 84 hours, and for 64 hours in all other years, though in one of those five years it means they are closed for 100 hours of a 108-hour period.

By contrast, here in the Principality of Monaco the big Carrefour is closed for only a 38-hour window around and including the 25th.

Even in Germany, quite a number of people have to work on Sundays and public holidays anyway. And there are lots of people who would actually be happy to work on a Sunday and even more so on December 26th, which is a public holiday in only a very few countries.

Admittedly, Germany is in such bad shape that it has bigger issues to fix than the enormous inconvenience (and total idiocy) of grocery shopping around Christmas. For instance, I pay a lot less for electricity now (not a significant cost factor for me, but instructive) than I used to, and where I live now, people's average disposable income dwarfs that of the German population and the economy here doesn't depend on low energy costs either.

I can only recommend to all those who have the opportunity: leave that place as it's going down the tubes. Even a new chancellor won't help much as the next government(s) would at best slow down but not prevent the decline. The problems are too fundamental to be solved anytime soon: several governments, not only but also the Merkel regime, dealt irreparable harm to that country. Apparently, many qualified migrants have recently left because they see the country is misguided and there are greener pastures (sometimes simply because of a better price-performance ratio of the cost of living, often coupled with better weather). For instance, fewer and fewer of the foreign students who attend German universities actually want to live and work there later.