Croatia is banning shopping on Sundays

Tourism-Dependent Croatia Moves to Ban Shopping on Most Sundays

A Bloomberg headline.

Good for them.

A government spokesman stated; "We want to make it possible for retail employees to spend Sundays with their families”

More than 85% of Croatians are Roman Catholics.  Sunday is, of course, the Christian day of rest, and Christians are supposed to take this seriously.  Catholics, although they frequently don't, are definitely supposed to take it seriously, save for good reason to the alternative.

Here's out this shakes out in Europe, but as to large supermarkets:

By Imre Kristoffer Eilertsen - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107694359

Red on this map generally means closed. Green means wide open. Blue means that supermarkets hours are restricted to around six hours.

What all can we tell from this?  Well, perhaps not too much.  Some of the results are surprising.  The countries that are in red don't surprise me.  All but two of the geographic areas depicted are Catholic or Orthodox, and that's part of their cultural heritage.  But some of the green areas are too.  And Norway is a highly secularized Lutheran country, albeit one with a very strong social conscience that they inherit from their Medieval Catholicism, even if they would prefer to pretend it come from their Reformation Lutheranism.

Partial restrictions in France don't surprise me, but in England they do, given as the UK is the birth place of the corporate capitalist economy.

In North American, "blue laws" are state by state, and province by province, but it would be rare to find restrictions in our "you are a consumer" shot 24 hours a day culture anymore.  And of note, South American has no restrictions, even though you might guess that it would.

Well, kudos to Croatia.