Law Of Confusion: Opening hours

In 2012 the national government introduced a round of measures designed to liberalise the retail sector and opening hours. An experiment in fourteen cities across Spain, including parts of Palma, that allowed shops to adopt all but unlimited opening hours all year round (to include Sundays and holidays) tested the impact of opening-hours liberalisation in cities with a large tourist presence. According to statistics compiled by the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (open university), liberalisation would add 0.78% to national GDP, which translated as 8,263 million euros and 16,272 jobs.

The system was thus to be extended to what were already known by the acronym ZGAT (zonas de gran afluencia turística - areas with large tourist influx). ZGAT municipalities across Spain (some towns or cities can have more than one such area) were to be able to decide whether or not they wanted to liberalise opening hours by declaring themselves all-year-round ZGATs. This measure was adopted in the Balearics under the region's Commercial Law approved in October 2014. Under this law, opening hours are normally restricted to a maximum of ninety hours a week for all working days (including Saturdays) and a maximum of sixteen days a year of Sunday and holiday opening, but ZGATs, which already had liberalised Sunday/holiday opening hours in the summer, were to be allowed to apply these to the whole year.

In Mallorca there are a number of towns which are not ZGATs, meaning that the potential for all-year liberalisation does not apply to them. In eleven municipalities, Palma being one of them, ZGAT is applicable to only certain parts of the municipality. In nineteen others, ZGAT applies to the whole town, one of these being Alcúdia. It, as with other ZGAT areas, operates opening hours according to two seasons, the summer season starting on 15 March and finishing at the end of October. As a ZGAT, shops in Alcúdia have been able to open much when they like during the summer, a situation which will continue. But only certain types of shop will now be permitted to open on Sundays and holidays during the winter, because Alcúdia town hall has rejected the notion of making the town all-year-round ZGAT.

An immediate impact of the town hall's decision has been, or appears to have been, that the two Eroski supermarkets that had been opening on a Sunday are now closed and will be until March. Notices direct customers to the store in neighbouring Sa Pobla, a town which, rather bafflingly, is a ZGAT and, because its town hall has declared it to be, an all-year-round ZGAT, to boot. Alcúdia's rejection came after small businesses lobbied against liberalisation. With one eye on the next election perhaps, the town hall sided with the small businesses, mayor Coloma Terrasa noting (and tellingly so, one feels) that now was not the time for liberalisation.

Small business associations across the island have been up in arms over ZGAT extension, claiming that it is designed to help only the larger retailers, those with shopfloors of more than 300 square metres. This size limit is a further aspect that has to be considered. There are general exceptions when it comes to Sunday opening restriction, such as with newsagents and, subject to certain provisions, shops under 300 square metres.

The Eroski supermarkets in Alcúdia are an interesting case. One presumes that it is the town hall's rejection of all-year ZGAT that has led to their closure, but then how was it that they used to be open on Sundays in winter? I don't have an answer to that, but the small business association in a different town, Manacor, has claimed that there has been an abuse of ZGAT.

It needs stressing that objections to ZGAT extension are based on competition and not on a notion of keeping Sunday special. Whether larger supermarkets being open on Sundays in winter would make a great deal of competitive difference is a moot point. Whether it is necessary for them to be open at all on Sundays is another. Areas of large tourist influx? In winter? Alcúdia isn't, but it is more likely to have what tourists are around than a town like Sa Pobla. With the best will in the world, it attracts comparatively few tourists in summer, begging a question as to why it has ever been a ZGAT. If Sa Pobla might be an anomaly, then Vilafranca most definitely is. How does it qualify as a ZGAT and an all-year one, its town hall having adopted the measure? If it can be a ZGAT, then why not, for example, Artà?

The law is confusing in application and consequence. One rule for one town, one rule for the next. If it was improved competitiveness that the government was hoping for, then this is no way to achieve it.

* The decision by Alcúdia town hall has now been reversed, so Alcúdia is an all-year ZGAT and the large supermarkets are able to open on Sundays and holidays all-year round.