Wide Open Shopping

The first year I attended the University of Georgia, in Athens, I lived in an apartment complex called Callaway Gardens near a busy four-lane highway lined with fast food joints and other roadside businesses. To me, this was city living. With some 50,000 inhabitants at the time, Athens was the biggest town I had ever lived it – and with the exception of Helsinki, it still is.

On the other side of the highway from my apartment, at the bottom of a hill, was a Kroger supermarket. It was the closest big grocery store and was open 24 hours a day. I recall once going there with my roommates at 3 o’clock in the morning to do our food shopping because...well, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just because we could. Maybe we were pulling an all-nighter. Who knows? As you might expect, the place was practically deserted. No waiting at the checkout lanes.

Anyway, I was thus introduced to the convenience of 3 a.m. shopping, something that Athenians had perhaps been enjoying for years. That was in 1976.

It was very different when I moved to Helsinki a few years later. Like many European nations, Finland had always imposed strict limits on when stores could open their doors, the result of the combined influence of the national churches and the labor unions. I’m not quite sure why the clergy and unions should object so strongly to Sunday shopping, since almost no one goes to church anyway and retail workers get paid extra if they work outside regular weekday hours.

In any case, when I came here in the 80s, Sunday opening was still strictly verboten, except for service stations and kiosks. Other days of the week, stores were allowed do business only beginning at eight in the morning and had to close by eight in the evening (or six on Saturdays).

Opening hours were gradually expanded in the 1990s by two hours to between seven and nine (but still only to six on Saturdays). Even then, no shopping on the Sabbath for the Finns.

It feels like only yesterday (okay, it was in fact in 2000) that larger stores were finally allowed to open on most Sundays (between noon and six), much to the relief of hordes of working parents. Suddenly, we didn’t have to squeeze our major weekly shopping into Saturdays. Oh, the luxury of being able to push an overflowing cart of groceries around a big box store until 6 o’clock on a Sunday!

That’s the way it has stayed for most of this century, with some additional gradual loosening of opening hours in recent years for smaller stores (under 400 square meters in size) and even for bigger ones on certain religious holidays, mainly Epiphany (loppiainen, in Finnish), when stores have the chance to harvest extra business from Russian tourists making Christmas holiday visits from across the border.

(January 6^th, which in Finland is Epiphany, the day the Magi brought presents to Baby Jesus, is celebrated as Christmas Eve in Russia, due to the Russian Orthodox Church clinging to the old calendar created under Julius Caesar. No fancy 16^th-century tinkering around with the calendar by Pope Gregory for them!)

Even with expanded opening times, some other public holidays have remained sacred. An American tourist making a port call from a cruise ship this summer was interviewed on a Helsinki street by a TV reporter. He complained bitterly how on his one and only day in the Finnish capital absolutely no shops were open. It was Juhannus, Midsummer’s Day, a day of relaxing and partying in the countryside. Who would want to shop then anyway?

As of six days ago, however, the gates of the Finnish shopping world have been thrown wide open. A new law removes absolutely any restrictions on opening hours, leaving it entirely up to any retail businesses to decide how to arrange its business hours, even allowing them to open on any public holidays. It’s up to the store to decide if staying open late or on holidays justifies the higher salaries that employees get for those hours.

It’s a huge change for Finland, and probably quite unusual in Europe. For example, the EU capital Brussels still closes shut at six, eight at the latest.

Our local suburban grocery is open today, though not for the first time on Epiphany. Thanks to the new law, it will soon introduce new hours, staying open until ten, even on Saturdays and Sundays.

Will I ever be able to walk over there at 3 a.m. to load up on fish sticks, cheese and potatoes? For that store, as for most others in Helsinki, I doubt operating around the clock would ever make economic sense. And anyway I doubt I’d want to shop again in the dead of night. 

But you never know. 

Finns bustling at the Sello shopping mall near Helsinki. Photo by Skorpion87.

The End of Christmas

This past Friday was one of those days when Finns are treated to a free holiday thanks to this being an officially Christian nation.  Friday was Epiphany, a religious holiday that is totally unfamiliar to a totally lapsed Baptist such as myself.  Still, as a quick look at Wikipedia will tell you, Epiphany is celebrated by many non-protestant Christians as the day that three visitors from the East arrived at baby Jesus’ cow shed, bearing gifts. 

The fact the Magi didn’t show up until January 6^th would be surprising for many folks back home (or at least Baptists), since I suspect most Americans moved on from Christmas already a couple of weeks ago and have now set their sights on Groundhog Day.  Or maybe the Super Bowl. 

In Finland, the holiday is called Loppiainen, which basically means “the ending”, and though it does commemorate the visit of the Three Wise Men, in reality it’s typically the day when families across the land take down their Christmas trees and decorations.  My family often hangs onto our tree longer, waiting to throw it out only after almost every needle has dropped and what’s left is ready to spontaneously combust. 

As on Christmas Day itself, stores are closed for Loppiainen.  Except, maybe not any more.  This year, storeowners in parts of Finland received special permission to stay open on Friday because the opportunity for commerce was just too great to pass up. 

January 6^th may be Epiphany for predominately Lutheran Finns, but it is Christmas Eve for Russians, who being largely Eastern Orthodox follow their own religious calendar.  It’s a huge holiday for Russians and a great excuse for dashing over to Finland to take advantage of the after-Christmas sales here.  It was reported that on Thursday alone 50,000 Russians passed through border crossings in southeast Finland, an all-time one-day record. 

This trend has exploded in recent years.  Finland lies less than 180 kilometers (115 miles) from St. Petersburg, a metropolis with a population equal to all of Finland (about like that of Boston) and has become a shopping mecca for newly affluent Russians.  As strange as it might seem to me, the prices of popular must-have items such as iPads are supposedly lower here than in the Russian homeland, enticing more and more Russians to come here to shop.  And, they do shop.  In a Helsinki mall, a Russian teenager interviewed by a Finnish newspaper explained that she had 2000 euros (2500 dollars) to spend on her holiday visit here.  Or at least, she continued, her parents were hoping it wouldn’t be more than that.  

It is all very different from when I first came here in the early 1980s.  In those grimmer Cold War days, the few Russians I saw in Helsinki where usually gazing out at the city through the foggy windows of clunky busses operated by Intourist, the official Soviet travel agency founded by Joe Stalin, as they made their way to the (formerly) leftist-affiliated Hotel Presidentti, the main accommodations for Soviet visitors back then. 

Out on the street, Soviet-era Russian visitors always traveled as a group, and I still recall seeing them standing, as a group, before a shop window staring at Western goods they could never hope to buy.  There was, however, at least one store in those days where Soviet tourists could afford to shop – Anttila, a discount place just around the corner from Hotel Presidentti and apparently within the hard-currency budget of visitors from across the Iron Curtain. 

Now nearly 30 years later, Russian visitors come in far greater numbers and are more likely to arrive in their own SUV, not packed in a grungy bus.  And they are no different than any other foreign visitors to Helsinki, except they don’t come only in the warm summer months.  And I suspect they spend more money than the average tourist in Finland, reflecting how live has improved for Russians compared to the 1980s, or at least for some. 

Anttila is still around, though today it’s a quite normal department store chain.  Other shops, such as Tarjoustalo and Hong Kong, have taken Anttila's place as discount retailers, though I suspect these shops are not feeling the boost from the Russian holiday trade nearly as much as fashionable and sprawling Stockmann and other swanky stores. 

No doubt, the overall boost to sales is good news for the Finnish economy and certainly a big enough incentive for stores to open their doors on Epiphany for those visitors from the East who aren't bearing gifts, but instead looking to buy some.