The Economics of Good Friday

Walking along Hornington High Street on Good Friday, as I said, brought it home to me how the day is for very many people no different from any other working day. This is the case with most 'Bank Holidays' - the banks are about the only businesses that don't open.

When I was small in the early '70s my mum spent rather a lot of her time shopping, going from one smallish shop to another every couple of days; the closest we had to a supermarket was Fine Fare, no bigger than the Co-Op in Swanvale Halt is now, and that was a couple of miles away. Bank Holidays then, and for a long time afterwards, required careful management because families knew that all the shops would be shut and you would have had to stock up on necessary supplies beforehand. If you went out for a drive on a Bank Holiday Monday that also demanded care because places that would be open to sell you petrol were far from plentiful.

Gradually the supermarkets became commercially dominant, and all those smaller shops my mum used to visit went out of business. This meant that Bank Holidays were if anything even more traumatic as everyone in a given area had to converge on a few major shops in order to stock up. At the same time, changes in the gendered structure of work and the fragmentation of the working environment meant that even having a single day when shops were shut became increasingly inconvenient for many families; British society could no longer see a convincing reason why it couldn't buy a packet of biscuits on a Sunday when Mum was no longer available to get it during the week, because she was probably at work like Dad.

The supermarkets, as the major providers of necessities, therefore pioneered and campaigned for Sunday trading and then Bank Holiday trading as well. However, although they'd out-competed most of their rivals there were still other shops selling lots of non-necessary goods. Nobody was ever going to be beating on the door of the Edinburgh Woollen Mill or Jojo Maman Bébé or even the Oxfam shop demanding to get in at, say, 11am on Good Friday and feeling deeply resentful if they couldn't, but in places such as Hornington with two major supermarkets fairly contiguous to the High Street it began to make economic sense for those businesses to open on Bank Holidays as well: if people are going to be around anyway, why miss a day's trading? Of course demanding that your staff come in and work on those days, even if you pay them extra or allow them time off to compensate, itself contributes towards the fragmentation and individualisation of working life which fuelled the entire process in the first place.

That's what I thought, anyway.