EUROPEAN DIARY:Strong legal codes, some of them a legacy of more religious times. severely limit Sunday trading in Brussels, writes ARTHUR BEESLEY
IT WAS time for a trim, my hair grown a little unruly. New in town, I dropped into the first barber I found. No joy. The guy was a dozer.
– Bonjour. Where will I sit? – Have you an appointment? – No.
– Then I can’t do it. I only do appointments.
– But your shop is empty.
– I have an appointment at 1.30. – It’s five past one!
– I only do appointments.
Anyone can have a bad day, of course, but this fellow was champion of the slow lane. He was open for business, but only to the extent that he was taking appointments.
Brussels is like everywhere else, customer service varies. When it’s good – and it frequently is – it’s very good indeed. Some places we’ve been to could hardly be matched for helpfulness and spontaneous kindness. As buggy-pushing parents of tiny kids, we’ve seen this again and again.
When customer service is bad, however, it’s grim. No matter where you go in the world, you’ll always find surly staff. In New York, for instance, the worst are too cool to care. In Brussels, they might snarl or snap at the most basic questions.
Important here is a certain attachment to rules and procedure, which knows few bounds. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Sunday shopping, which is limited in Belgium as elsewhere on the continent. A legacy of more religious times, the rules owe much to industrial relations and find expression in a legal code of strong-willed rigour.
On this particular issue, one’s own finely-honed sense of hypocrisy thrives. In principle, I’m all for a day of rest and a chance to cleanse the self of filthy consumerism. In real life, however, it can be a dreadful inconvenience.
Navigation is tricky. When first encountered, the system led to certain pressures at evening time on Saturday. Yes, a local Sunday market provides limitless options in the realm of veg, fruit, bread, cheese and cold meat. But it’s not much use if nappy supplies are running ominously low.
Certain small supermarkets open on Sunday, a blessing when discovered. Strangely, though, some of them stay closed throughout Saturday. While the city also boasts an extensive range of night shops, they are obliged to shut their doors between 7am and 6pm.
All shopkeepers must take an uninterrupted rest period of 24 hours each week. They can determine this rest period independently and, if they wish, can open on Sunday – but they are not allowed to employ any personnel on Sunday. Exceptions are made for bakeries, butchers, small food stores, florists and the like, who can open until 1pm.
Moves to relax the regime have proved contentious. In the face of opposition three years ago, the government forced through a modest reform when it extended to six or nine Sundays per year a three-Sunday exception to the general rule. Pay must be at least double the normal wage and companies that do not recognise trade unions are bound by sectoral deals made by unions.
A minority group of small shop owners, the Liberal Association of Self-Employed, has campaigned for a total liberalisation of opening hours. Yet bigger retail lobbies have resisted the push, their members in fear of being overwhelmed by large corporations if the floodgates open.
However, the question has gone away politically. “There’s no big debate anymore, so it’s a fact of life,” says Guy Van Gyes, an academic in the Research Institute for Work and Society at the Catholic University of Leuvan.
“Maybe there are some people who’d like more opening on Sundays, but I don’t think it’s an issue any more.”
None of this is to imply overbearing exactitude in Brussels life, far from it. I know of cafe-bars here that don’t sell food but invite people to bring in their own from an outdoor take-away nearby, Belgium’s answer to Leo Burdock. The sense of conviviality is palpable. There’s charm on tap, too, in the bakeries of Brussels, pinpointed by friends who are a key source of local intelligence. They were right.
Then there are the things that are rarely seen at home anymore.
In central Dublin, for example, filling stations are virtually extinct. Although some sites were sold off at vast profit during the property mania, an industry chief told me long ago that fuel pumps in town centres had been regulated out of existence due to health and safety rules and other concerns.
Now, the reflex might well be to pin the blame for this state of affairs on “Brussels”. Over here, however, there seems to be a station on every other corner.