Shop till you drop

Since petrol stations aren’t covered by these shopping hour regulations. I set off on foot to the nearest Orlen station, only to findwhen I got there that they don’t sell bread. Therefore, I walked home, got in my car and drove off to the Circle K station, where they do. Perhaps a little unfairly, I started ranting to my wife about how state-owned companies don’t have the nous to realise that occasionally under the present circumstances people might need to use them as grocery stores. There can be no doubt that current regulations have drastically altered our shopping behaviour and now I find myself spending far more time in my local Żabka convenience store than I would like.

Strangely enough, this was the very outcome that the government seemed to desire back in 2016, when it introduced its so-called supermarket tax aimed at taxing retail outlets based on their floor space. At that time I was writing freelance for a different publication and was asked to write an article on this topic. In those days, in my naivety, I thought I could write pretty much anything I liked as long as it was the truth and when I came across the official justification for the original bill, I thought I had just found a cache of dynamite hidden in plain sight. This text now seems to have been taken down from the web, so all I have is my own translation of one excerpt. Basically, this reads that the taxation was intended to counteract the expansion of foreign retail networks because they had the financial means and the requisite know-how to dominate the retail market. I decided to call a protectionist spade a protectionist spade, but my editor balked. She told me that my article was too aggressive and when I asked: “But isn’t this the line we take?” – she agreed. Even today, on a government website you can still read that the then-prime-minister Beata Szydło said:“We want to tell Polish retailers, Polish family companies that we offer them a tool which will give them an opportunity to compete and remain on the market.” Unsurprisingly, the EU slapped this law down. The government kept amending the act so that it would enter into force a little later but the EU kept slapping it down again and again and again.

At around about the same time the government also proposed its rather infamous ban on Sunday trading. Its rationale for this was that retail workers were frequently overworked and could not spend time with their families even on Sundays. And indeed, on the very first non-shopping Sunday that’s exactly what nearly every small retailer did. My wife happened to run out of cigarettes that day. Even though small family stores were allowed to open almost none of them did. When we did find a place that was open it had a queue coming out of the door. However, the next Sunday, every small store was open. Soon afterwards, I was interviewing a shopping centre developer. I can’t remember what the original topic was, but I happened to mention that the act would probably even change the design of malls. At this point he pulled out the plans for his latest project and pointed to an insignificant corner. “This is where I was going to put a cafe!” he bemoaned. But that section of the mall was now going to be closed off on Sundays and so he’d been forced to locate this tenant closer to the cinema so that itwould be allowed to continue operating throughout the week.

The Polish Council of Shopping Centres (PRCH) has been lobbying relentlessly for the repeal of this act. It has even pointed out that there are ways to ensure that store workers have the time to spend Sundays with their families without these blanket closures. That these pleas have fallen on deaf ears is of absolutely no surprise to me. My colleague recently wrote that Stanisław Szwed, the minister of family, work and social policy, had referred the matter to Solidarity. Well, that was the trade union that proposed the act in the first place so they are hardly likely to say: “Dammit! We got it wrong!” In fact, with me spending all that time in Żabka, withTesco packing up its bags ready to go home and with all these foreigners complaining about losing money, I would say the PRCH has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Looking at it from the government’s point of view, the Sunday trading ban has been a resounding success. And what’s more, that supermarket tax I mentioned earlier – it turns out that by the time you read this, it will have come into force with the beginning of the new year.