Posted on 04/02/2015 3:21:22 PM PDT by Colofornian
There are 3 ½ days when almost all shops are required to be closed under the Shop Trading Hours Repeal Act 1990. These days are:
Christmas Day
Good Friday
Easter Sunday; and
ANZAC Day, until 1.00 pm on 25 April.
(Excerpt) Read more at dol.govt.nz ...
We used to have Blue Laws.
Have to? Or want to?
Lived in New Zealand from 1982 to 1984 (in Wellington). I can remember the stores closing at about 1:00pm on Saturdays and my parents thought that rather quaint, lol.
Thank heavens they are gone.
I would like all businesses to be open 24/7.
What if a gay muslim minority wants to have a “ceremony” on one of those days?
So did we in Pennsylvania. Most retail establishments were closed on Sunday. I suppose those laws also applied to holidays as well.
To this day I don’t shop on Sundays or holidays.
In the list of businesses on that page, a “dairy” is pretty much what most Americans know better as a convenience store, and “take away” (as in the British usage) is what most Americans know better as “takeout.”
We had blue laws on Sunday and the major holidays when I was growing up. Mom would get up early and boil water to dip chicken in after dad had wrung its neck, then it was cleaned and stowed in the ice box while we all went to Sunday School and church. Then home for freshly fried chicken and homemade potato salad which mom prepared while my dad churned the ice cream. Always had some family over for dinner or the minister and his wife. Then we all played croquet, cleaned up and were off to Training Union and Sunday evening services. After church we watched Amos and Andy or played Scrabble, had dessert and were off to bed. Wonderful family time and great memories.
Then I suppose leftist-run corporations like Angie's List, Anthem Inc., Eli Lilly, will apply socio-political pressure & leftist metro governments in places like Seattle & San Francisco will issue travel bans to New Zealand.
Similar story with Catholic leanings. We didn’t have a TV so listened to the radio.
Other memories from 1982 to 1984 New Zealand include no advertising on TV on Sundays (in addition to stores being closed), only two TV channels and one of them did not come on until about mid day, listening to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem on Sunday mornings, “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood being banned in 1983-84 by Radio New Zealand, my Dad’s coworkers’ memories of the “Six o clock Swill” that was around through the 1960s, Double Happys on Guy Fawkes, cinema admission at $1.25, etc
I should also point out—mainly for those who don’t know the time difference very well—that as I type, New Zealand is already well into the Good Friday closure.
The time in the US is now a bit past 7 pm (Eastern Daylight, or what appears sometimes as “-0400”), 4 pm (Pacific Daylight, “-0700”), or 1 pm (Hawaii-Aleutian Standard, “-1000”) on Thursday. (In other words, Eastern Daylight Time is 4 hours from what you may call UT or GMT. If the UK didn’t have DST that puts London after midnight already, it would be a bit past 11 pm there.)
The time in New Zealand is a bit past 12 noon (also DST, “+1300”) on Friday. Any “three hours’ service”—from noon to three—is (or should be!) beginning.
P.S.
One side effect of communicating in real time with people in other parts of the world is learning more about time differences; that’s how I got to learning about time in New Zealand.
What struck me most about learning about New Zealand time was noticing how little difference in clock time there is—the calendar day is another matter—between Hawaii and New Zealand, especially when New Zealand has DST during the southern summer and Hawaii doesn’t Spring Forward itself for DST. I might’ve guessed about the small difference earlier from noticing longitudes on a map, but I hadn’t. Hawaii isn’t that far east of 180°, and New Zealand is even closer to 180°.
What struck me even more is that when we’re all on DST, there’s actually a smaller difference between the clock time in New Zealand and the clock time in the Pacific Time Zone (4 hours) than between the clock time in the Pacific Time Zone and the clock time in Newfoundland (4.5 hours). It reminds me that St. John’s, Newfoundland, is closer to London (UK, not Ontario) than to Vancouver.
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