Open All Hours (Eventually)

A Sunday morning. The time is just past half nine. The place is the port area of Alcúdia. I have parked the car and am walking towards a newsagents. On the other side of the road something catches my eye. It is the neon light of a shop. I stop and stare. There are lights on inside the shop and there are also people inside the shop.

What had caused me to do a double-take? Well, look again at the day and the time. And if I tell you that the shop wasn't a shop as such but a hairdressers, then you might begin to understand why I was taken aback. Early on a Sunday in winter, you expect only the newsagents and the odd bar to be open.

Opening hours in Mallorca are virtually a metaphor for a more general Spanish uncompetitiveness. They can seem arbitrary, unreliable and infuriating. The siesta break is the most infuriating aspect of all. In an effort to improve productivity, the national commission for the rationalisation of Spanish working hours has wanted to scrap the siesta. Even if it were to succeed, the chances are the siesta would still be observed, if it suited shopowners to do so.

For all the infuriation, one considers local opening hours with the benefit of an Anglo-Saxon mentality and culture. It isn't the same culture or mentality to that of the Mallorcan and, in turn, the Mallorcan mentality is not the same as that in Catalonia or Madrid.

This mentality was explained by Guy de Forestier in "Beloved Majorcans". Time itself adopts its own definition and so determines attitudes to opening or closing, while the process of selling is one in which the last thing the Mallorcan shopowner or worker appears to wish to do is to actually sell anything. Time may have its own definition in Mallorca, but it has moved on since de Forestier was writing. But not so much that time has come to re-define itself. Except ...

The apparent indifference to the practice of commerce is no longer as obvious as it once might have been. A hairdressing salon open at 9.30 on a Sunday morning is an example of how things have changed, and for hairdressing salons that have been caught in a price and competition war courtesy of franchises and Asian owners, it has become necessary to be more flexible. Nevertheless, it was with genuine surprise that I saw that the salon was open.

Opening hours, in addition to culture and mentality, are a thing of union and business pressures and of government regulation and classification. A micro-management of the retail industry might seem outmoded, but it isn't so long ago that England and Wales endured the wrangle over keeping Sunday special. De-regulation of opening hours, even for the Protestant work ethic-minded Anglo-Saxon (or Celt), has existed for less than 20 years, while in ultra-efficient Germany, liberalisation of opening hours continues to be resisted.

Business pressures (and, unlike Germany, religious pressures are not really a factor) have helped to hold back liberalisation. These are pressures not from large organisations but from small shopowners who fear the consequences of the increased costs of longer opening (assuming that they would open of course). As such, this aspect of the debate is not dissimilar to that which occurred in England. It is one that the regional government in the Balearics is well aware of, but the government is minded to de-regulate, albeit that it has hinted that it would not go so far as Madrid where 24/7 opening is now permissible.

In order to facilitate this, there would need to be a scrapping of the current system of commercial classification as it applies to different towns and indeed parts of towns. In "zones" which are considered to have great tourist "flow", there is nothing to stop most shops staying open all day every day from mid-March to the end of October.

Categorisation by tourist zone means, however, that some parts of Palma can be open and others not. It also means that some towns which are only questionably "tourist", such as Sa Pobla, can be open whereas Santa Margalida town cannot be. But then there is the rest of the year when there is no tourist flow, or maybe there would be this flow if the shops could open. To be honest, I am none too sure that the hairdressers should in fact be open on a Sunday.

De-regulation will occur and open all hours will, more or less, become the norm. But for which shops? Mentality takes a long time to alter, if indeed it ever does.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.