By Maria Wilczek
When Poland’s ban on Sunday trading was introduced in 2018, shopkeepers turned creative. A grocery store in Piaseczno near Warsaw put up paintings by local artists above its beer fridges to qualify as an “art gallery”. The shop’s new status as a cultural institution allowed it to stay open throughout the weekend.
But soon, a much simpler method emerged and was widely adopted. An exemption to the ban that allowed postal points to remain open on Sundays meant that suddenly whole chains of grocery stores and supermarkets began offering such services.
Now, under pressure from trade unionists, that postal loophole has been closed by the government. Shops are tight-lipped about potential new workarounds, but experts say that such tricks will be much harder to pull this time.
Going postal
The pioneer in exploiting the loophole was Żabka, Poland’s largest convenience chain, which signed deals with postal services and successfully defended its Sunday openings in court.
Initially, though, most supermarkets and discounters fell in line and remained closed on Sundays. But this summer, many of the biggest players – including Kaufland, Lidl, Biedronka, Netto, Auchan and Aldi – launched postal services and started keeping stores open over the whole weekend.
That has disgruntled the Solidarity trade union, which, along with the Catholic church, initially pushed for the trading ban in order to guarantee workers a day off on Sunday. “Legislators may not have believed that such a mockery of Polish law could ensue, but it has,” says Alfred Bujara, who heads the trade employee branch of Solidarity.
That has prompted the government to finally tighten the screws with an amendment that Poland’s President Andrzej Duda signed into law last Monday. Shops now have three months to plan their response.
What’s in store
The new legislation will now require businesses to make at least 40% of their monthly revenue from postal retail services to qualify for the exemption allowing them to stay open on Sunday. No large retailer is likely to clear that threshold.
“Supermarkets, hypermarkets and discount chains will all close,” says Karol Tokarczyk, a retail expert at Polityka Insight, a Warsaw-based think tank. He told Notes from Poland that there is no clear way for big-box outlets to wriggle out of the new rules.
Smaller shops will, however, have another window. Those operating as a franchise – including Żabka’s 7,500 stores, which are run by 6,000 separate people – will be allowed to stay open provided that the owner or their non-employed family members are behind the counter.
But this may be of little comfort. A straw poll by Notes from Poland last Sunday showed that, of ten Żabka stores in the centre of Łódź, all were manned by employees, while the franchise owners took the day off.
When the new legislation was passing through parliament, the Senate proposed allowing employees who are students or retirees to stand in on Sundays, but that was rejected by a committee in the lower-house Sejm.
According to Paweł Jachowski, deputy editor-in-chief of Wiadomości Handlowe, a retail news service, the franchisees may step in thanks to rewards, such as bonuses, offered by chains for opening stores on Sundays.
Solidarity does not mind if that happens. “Someone running a business can themselves decide if they want to keep their store open,” said Bujara. “Our goal was for employees to be able to have the day off.”
Looking for new loopholes
The amended legislation retains a number of other pre-existing exemptions. As before, specialist shops selling press, souvenirs or religious items, as well as certain other businesses, including florists and pharmacies, can remain open.
Some enterprising businesses may try to tap into these niches, say experts. “Attempts to close legal loopholes are treated as a challenge,” says Andrzej Tucholski, a lecturer in business psychology at SWPS, a university in Warsaw. “Poles adore stories about brave individuals fighting against the odds.”
Jachowski notes that some stores could qualify as “tobacco points”, which must make at least 40% of their revenue from such products.
“Lots of small shops mostly selling alcohol and cigarettes will qualify,” he says. But he adds that those would mostly be the kind of small shops “that have stuck around since the dawn of the market economy in Poland” rather than major outlets.
Another solution could be stocking up on fish. In September, MPs debated the scope of a new exemption for stores “dealing with the receipt of fish products and trade in such products”. However, it remains unclear how courts will interpret the loose wording.
“Using such exceptions would be cutting it pretty close,” says Jachowski. “I cannot see large chains playing such hardball.” He notes that they have “kept their mouths shut until the law goes into effect” – either to avoid a regulatory crackdown or for lack of ideas.
“All retailers probably had contingency plans,” says Tucholski. “But now they are all waiting for the first chain to show its cards so that others can learn from its mistakes.”
A nation of online shoppers
To keep business moving all week long, shops may also look to online channels, which are exempt from the ban and have been growing rapidly in Poland during the pandemic. “The reform could give a boost to e-commerce,” says Tokarczyk.
In 2020, Poles bought 15.4 billion zloty (€3.3 billion) of products online, marking a 31.4% year-on-year increase, according to Analiza Rynku, a research agency. The share of online sales is expected to reach a fifth of all retail in Poland by 2023, up from around 15% in 2020.
Much of that growth is expected in online sales of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), where Poland, with between 0.5% and 0.7% of such purchases being made online, still lags behind western Europe, where the figure is around 10%.
A number of shops in Poland, including supermarket Auchan, online store Barbora and warehouse seller Makro, have recently expanded their refrigerated grocery deliveries to new cities.
Żabka and Biedronka – a large discount chain – have also struck deals with companies like Uber and Glovo to deliver products, even on Sundays. They are competing with a fast-growing sector of so-called “dark stores”, which focus entirely on quick home delivery.
According to Tokarczyk of Polityka Insight, the legal changes could also prompt more self-service stores in cities, following the lead of Lewiatan, which launched a 24/7 outlet in Kraków last year in response to the trading ban.
No mood for compromise
While the tighter trading ban now seems a done deal, employer organisations have been mulling alternative proposals as a compromise.
The Polish Trade and Distribution Organisation (POHiD), a lobby group representing large chains, has argued that workers could be offered a guarantee of at least two free Sundays per month, allowing businesses to rotate shifts.
Others have proposed keeping stores open but paying workers more. Carrefour has offered Sunday workers 30% of the minimum hourly wage on top of their regular earnings.
Solidarity, however, is not in the mood for compromise – and indeed wants even more concessions for workers.
“We’re happy with the amendment, we fought for it for more than two years,” says Bujara. But he adds that the pandemic has led many chains to extend their opening hours into the evenings to make up for slower traffic. “The overload is extreme.”
Next week, unionists will protest outside the headquarters of the employers union as well as the embassies of France, Germany and Portugal – where Poland’s largest grocery chains are owned – demanding “similar standards of pay and work” as in their domestic markets.
Now that the retail week has effectively been shortened, unionists want to shorten the retail day too.
Main image credit: Paul Sableman/Flickr (under CC BY 2.0)
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
