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.

Vive La Différence: It's all in the mind

"They come and expect a load of money. They work one day, and then the next, they can't be bothered to get up. They've been out till late, at a club or somewhere. Drinking or, you know, other stuff. Tell me, how many make a success of their businesses? Only a few. It's the mentality. That's the problem."

Fancy taking a guess as to who this is about and who said it?

Give up? Then I'll tell you. It was a Mallorcan who said it, and he was talking about the British and specifically British business owners. The mentality is one, I have to presume, of idleness and a proneness to hedonism before graft.

I did argue the point, but it wasn't really worth it. Once the mind is made up, it is made up. One, two, maybe three examples from the past that fit the argument, and the argument is won. That's how it works. From small examples, whole generalisations are made. Mallorcans do it. The British do it. We all do it. I can turn the argument around, cite examples of exactly what he was complaining of in the British and apply them to Mallorcans. But what would be the point?

It was unfair. Yes, there probably are, in fact I know there are, cases that confirm his argument, but I know an awful lot of cases which don't. Bar owners (and this was really all about bar owners) may not be making massive successes of things at present, but they are doing ok, working long hours, not going to clubs. Who can honestly say they are making massive successes of things just now? Mallorcans included, especially the ones who complain endlessly of the effects of the "crisis" and all-inclusives.

Why did this even come up? It was apropos of very little. Just going off on one. Or maybe it was indicative of something more deep-seated, more inclined not to usually be stated. And if it was, then it raises a question. What do the Mallorcans really think about the British? Not tourists so much as the British who live in Mallorca and especially those who make their livings in Mallorca.

From one example, I could make a case for saying that they don't rate the British very highly. But this would be to fall into the generalisation trap. The answer to my own question is that I have no real idea.

I have been trying to figure it all out, though. Was this outburst somehow representative of a tendency that has been perceptible over the recent past of crisis? One of a closing of Mallorcan ranks, one that has not been entirely surprising as a reaction to difficult times? But even if it were, it still doesn't explain the outburst. If a business owner, British or anyone, decides not to work hard and to not make a success of his or her business, then why should a Mallorcan care? Unless they're expecting the rent to be paid perhaps.

Is it that there is a more fundamental division? While plenty of British people have "crossed over" through marriage or through business partnership, while there are plenty of British people who have been so long on the island that they even speak Mallorquín, are the British a breed apart? If the answer to this is yes (and it almost certainly is), then it raises, and hardly for the first time, the whole issue as to how well or not the British integrate.

Yet, integration is a largely illusory state of being, especially for more recent comers, assuming you can actually define integration adequately, and I defy anyone to do so, given a contemporary society in which communications, media and other factors conspire to maintain and reinforce cultural, linguistic and social differences rather than break them down.

Ghettoisation exists not just in a physical way through proximity. It exists through social contact and, as importantly, in the head. It's for this reason, more than any other, that integration is such a specious concept. Barriers reside through a state of mind. My Mallorcan friend was right in one respect when he referred to mentality.

But of course, the reverse applies. The indigenous population is its own ghetto of supremacy, a state that was alluded to in Guy de Forestier's definitive "Beloved Majorcans", and one that exerts supremacy over mainlanders and the British and which has recaptured its resonance recently, following the years of encroaching cosmopolitanism. Mallorcans, obviously, have no need to go native, because they already are. And like any native population, they assume the birthright of primacy, just as the British do in their own land. And their own mental and social ghettoes are those of looking after their own. 'Twas ever thus, wherever you care to think of.

Own land, foreigners in a foreign land. Is that what this was all about? Maybe. Vive la différence? Is there long life to difference anywhere? Probably not.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.