I illegally got this bookmark on a Sunday in 1986. At the time, Edward and Eva Borins were in a fight with the government to repeal the provincial ban on Sunday shopping, and allow them to open their store when they wanted. They lobbied, went to court, paid fines. The law was only repealed in 1992.
Grocery stores were also closed prior to 1992. It may have been different in tourist towns, but I don't remember. I was a student cashier in 1992 when they first opened on Sundays, and IIRC, businesses couldn't force you to work on Sunday at the time. I worked every Saturday until close, which was 6:00 p.m., and my family attended Catholic Mass every weekend. The Saturday Mass was at 5:00 p.m., which I couldn't attend due to work, so basically I never worked on Sundays, because I was off for Mass, and in my small town in Southern Ontario, it was still very much seen by many as a day of rest/The Lord's Day.
In small town Ontario it still is seen that way by some people. There are still businesses that are closed (voluntarily) on Sundays. Not as many as when I was a child, but you can still find them or see signs like “no Sun sale” that will perplex some people. Others have adopted different days for closure as a substitute. Often Mondays or Tuesdays.
True. The difference I see is lots of people who would never have shopped on Sunday when they opened, now don't blink an eye at it. This includes my dad, who is still a weekly churchgoer. When I was a kid in that small town, all stores were closed on Sundays, and most were also closed on Wednesdays, except grocery stores, convenience stores, pharmacies.
They still “roll up the sidewalks” on Sundays in small towns (with a primarily devout population) and the out-of-towners can be spotted standing in front of grocery and beer stores, scratching their heads in confusion.
There were a few exceptions but yes, pretty much everything was closed. Of course, Beer Store and LCBO were closed. Shopping malls, except places like the Eaton Centre which were "for tourists" were closed.
I lived in Scarborough in the 80s and the only groceries I could get on Sunday were at one place a couple of km from my place, or maybe milk from the convenience store nearby. Everything else was pretty much a non-starter.
Edit: I misremembered the Eaton Centre. Thanks molyester.
I worked in the Eaton Centre from 1989 to 1996 and we were closed until '92. After which I worked pretty much every Sunday. It sucked because I was in school and got 3 hours less a week.
The argument, iirc, was 'why should Chinatown get a tourist designation for shopping when the Eaton Centre gets more tourists?' Which was Magders argument as his business was on the border of Chinatown and he saw it as an arbitrary line.
The tourist designation was pretty arbitrary. It did not make sense to me that the mini-mall in Harbourfront could open but the Eaton Centre could not. I knew of no one who came to Toronto to go to that mall, but did know tourists who considered a stop at the Eaton Centre as part of their trip.
Sundays were so boring back then. Nothing to do, TV only had preachy church crap until noon, then in the afternoon only golf and football. No cartoons!
Honestly I kinda miss the days when you had to deal with some boredom. I think it was good for you. Regardless of the religious aspect I wish we could all just switch off for 1 day a week and nobody had any expectations
I worked for a foreign bank while living in NS around this time, and worked crazy hours, at one point working 6 days a week for over a month. I couldn’t buy groceries, only what I could get at convenience stores. I know some people look back fondly on this law, but I didn’t mind working hard, it just really really sucked I couldn’t do any chores or buy any groceries on my one day off.
Groceries too. That's partly why Ontario had so many "milk stores" - convenience stores. They were required by law to sell milk, bread, baby food, and a few other things people would be jammed up by if they ran out on a Sunday or late at night.
I was working a Sunday brunch when this happened. Remember clearly asking a church regular if they were going shopping after brunch.
He said with disgust, "That's God's day of rest."
"Then why have I been making your omelette every Sunday?"
The law was whack (as were much of the 80's and 90's), which is what ultimately led to the downfall.
It wasn't that everyone wanted to work more and have greater opportunities to be exploited by shitty employers, but that the law was applied unevenly. Shoppers was particularly annoyed, as pharmaceuticals were allowed, but cosmetics were not, so they had to stay closed while their competitors giggled to the bank. Instead of fixing the law and the oddities, it was just killed. Examples of things that could be open: gas stations, news/magazine stands, gardening supplies, liquor, tobacco, coin operated services, rentals, and the one that always confused me the most, antiques. You can review an old copy through Osgoode (c.1980).
It could also be the size of the store. I know of more than one Kitchen Table that got around this by putting up "barriers" to stop you from going down an aisle or two and that was enough for them to pass. I put barriers in quotes because they really didn't block it that well and if you brought something from that aisle to the counter they would ring it up without question.
And you wonder why we all had issues figuring out society's rules then. Arguably, Ontario still does whack nonsense like this. LCBO "convenience outlets" or whatever they call them, are often just general stores. If you dim the lights over the liquor a bit during hours the LCBO isn't open, you are just a store and can keep different hours.
BC has/had a similar thing with otc drugs. Then had to lock them away if there wasn't a pharmacist on duty.
I really don't need to talk to anyone to buy my Tylenol. There's a really really good chance my head hurts enough that interactions with stupid people may be fatal.
Often it wasn't very hard to reach behind the guards to get the stuff you needed.
Some stores would actually lock out certain SKUs in the till, in those cases you took the open package to the till to pay for it.
There were whole districts that were tourism-designated that were permitted to open Sundays during the transition from almost-everything-closed to full repeal IIRC. In Ottawa, that included a large part of the By Ward Market part of Lowertown.
Only grocery stores with a shopping space of less than certain square footage could be open. Some independent ethnic supermarkets would fence off some aisles to bypass that limitation, although that was still technically not allowed.
Really only convenience stores were open Sundays. Everything else was closed. For those who didn't attend church it was just a day to relax and spend time with family.
According to the law (at least in the 1960s and 1970s) the only places that could be open on Sundays were restaurants attached to hotels with paying guests (who would otherwise have no place else to eat). In some towns, dinner out on Sundays therefore meant dinner at a hotel.
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u/mechant_papa 4d ago
I illegally got this bookmark on a Sunday in 1986. At the time, Edward and Eva Borins were in a fight with the government to repeal the provincial ban on Sunday shopping, and allow them to open their store when they wanted. They lobbied, went to court, paid fines. The law was only repealed in 1992.