I think you’re getting some resistance below because the answer to your first question is Yes.

Not just “Yes, they close at night”, even.

The entire American mentality revolves around everything being available all the time, so it’s really jarring to come over here and see the equivalent of a 7-Eleven closing for two hours at lunchtime, half of Saturday and all of Sunday and Monday, and calling it a night at 7 on other days. And the local versions of Ralph’s, CVS, and Walmart doing the same.

So no, essentially nothing is open at night here. And it has been this way for forever, so it’s built into the culture at the DNA level. You would never consider going grocery shopping at 9pm. One should do such things at the appropriate time.

> And it has been this way for forever, so it’s built into the culture at the DNA level.

It used to be that shops closed for lunch. Some still do and then complain that customers shop in shopping centres.

People want what is convenient. Evenings and weekends are convenient because people are busy during weekdays and stay-at-home wives is no longer a thing in many cases.

It's like McDonald's. The 'correct' thing to do is to complain about them and to look down on them, but McDonald's is actually very, very successful in France...

Well, there's a few time where the supermarket that closed at 10 pm around the corner in Paris had been really useful.

In France it's illegal for stores to have employees work at night and on Sunday afternoon.

They are starting to go around this restriction by switching to self-checkout during those periods because, despite what other commenters have said, people do want longer opening hours.

> despite what other commenters have said, people do want longer opening hours.

No, not really.

According to [0], 61% of Frenchpeople consider this a step backward for workers, while 31% think it is necessary. Though the article implies the latter might be much higher in Paris.

http://www.leparisien.fr/societe/ouverture-nocturne-des-maga...

What is so wrong with freedom? Why can’t workers decide if they want to work certain hours? Why is the choice made for them by government? You know what is also bad for workers? Unemployment, and in France it’s chronically high because of so much worrying about the “workers.”

High unemployment means working conditions are a race to the bottom in some sectors. Is this what we want?

Shops and stores want to open because they know they have customers. Obviously night-time hours are more in demand in cities. That's all there is to it. People like to say something but do something else...

If 23%+ of people end up shopping during those time periods (since 77% say they don't outside Paris) then that's more than enough do say that people want longer opening hours.

Personally I think that shops open 7 days a week is very useful.

Let the market decides. The legal restrictions are paternalistic.

>"even here in America"

Not to derail the conversation, byt why the 'even'? 24h-stores seem like an inherently american concept to me (I'm german, so France is right around the corner)

The US 24h culture pales in comparison to that of East Asia.

> Not to derail the conversation, byt why the 'even'?

Well, you might notice that even though you put two different sets of quotation marks on it, the text you're attributing to me isn't what I wrote. It's "even" because I'm contrasting an urban environment, where 24-hour stores are a baseline expectation, with a suburban environment, where they aren't but we have them anyway.

My bad, that was inappropriate. That being said: I wouldn't call them a baseline expectation in urban environments. I live in a city of 250k people, and I don't think we have a 24h-store here.

When it comes to opening times of stores, us Germans are way behind everybody else...

I wouldn't say "behind" in that context. I do appreciate the convenience of 24h stores, but I don't see them as a progress for workers rights.

I generally agree with you, but it's utterly ridiculous that supermarkets etc. close at 8 already in some states (e.g. Bavaria). It would make more sense to keep themmopen until at least 9 or 10.

If the owner of a store wants to open it for 24 hours and he or employees are willing to work, how is that bad for workers rights? What’s bad for workers rights are people that would like the freedom to work a late shift or early shift but can’t because some do-gooder is trying to “protect” grown adults from making their own decisions.

> If the owner of a store wants to open it for 24 hours and he or employees are willing to work, how is that bad for workers rights?

That would be fine, but what is going to happen is that many workers will have to work night shifts unwillingly. It's bad for their physical and mental health.

Suppose you have a town with two stores. First store is willing to open 24 hours. Second store may have to do the same to compensate the loss of customers, and the workers there may have to work night shift even if they don't want to (I actually witnessed it first hand in my neighbourhood).

This is called a negative externality, and it is a well-known defect of free market. Even though you would think that opening a store 24h only impacts you and your customers, it negatively impacts other people.

This is a subjective opinion, but I would argue that the convenience of having 24h stores isn't worth the cost for the workers. Unfortunately, I think that I'm in the minority and that eventually we'll cross that line in Europe too, and it'll be hard to go back.

Need to make sure that restocking is done during the day or the customers won't notice that you have to move large containers through the store!

I understand that most stores would see little traffic at night, but on the other hand they'd also not need full staff, and they absolutely could do all the maintenance work at night. It annoys me similarly as "everybody must have the same two days off". So inefficient.

Having the same days off for most people makes for a more cohesive society where people have more time to interact with each other. Or at least, that's the idea.

Knowing families where people have different working hours or working days, it really takes a toll on interpersonal relations.

I get that argument, but I do believe that it applies more so to a past idea of society where everybody is close to average, i.e. mostly families with children. It makes sense to time days off for adults with those of children. The same goes for school holidays being timed with harvest season because plenty of children had to help on the family farm etc.

That's not our current reality, the percentage of singles and childless couples is growing and they don't need to be timed with school hours.

Adding flexibility would make everything run more smoothly. Right now we're having all the commercial traffic on 5/7 days and all the leisure time traffic on 2/7 days. Offices are empty 2/7 days.

Distributing that more evenly would benefit everyone. Less traffic during rush hour, less overrun parks on your day off, less crowded super markets and packages wouldn't need to be considered lost if they're diverted to the local branch where queues are usually longer than those in front of apple stores when new iphones get released.

My local (small, urban) supermarket isn’t even 24 hours (7am to 11pm, I think) and is constantly restocking throughout the day anyway. If sales volume is high enough, that’s presumably necessary.

Paris doesn’t have stores comparable to cvs from what I’ve seen. Monoprix is a grocery store but scaled down.

> stores comparable to cvs

I named them because they're open 24 hours and they seem like the closest fit to a convenience store. CVS is a "drug store", selling products in three basic categories: (1) grooming supplies (hairbrushes / fingernail clippers / makeup... this kind of thing); (2) a very stripped-down grocery inventory, including only prepackaged food (cereal / milk / poptarts / cookies / candy, but no fruit or meat); (3) health products ("nutritional supplements" / vitamins / aspirin / tums / cough drops / etc.).

A Family Mart in Shanghai is much smaller and offers different staples: food (including fruit, but largely prepackaged stuff), electronics cables, the machine that lets you pay your mobile phone bill (it's possible I'm out of date here). It's mostly food. Very much unlike CVS, they also offer a space in the store where you can sit and eat what you just bought, and if you bought instant noodles they'll give you boiling water for them.

There are American stores closer to that model, like 7-11, but I don't know that they stay open 24 hours. 7-11 is historically named after its operating hours. But I don't really see why that's important; if the mostly-prepackaged-food store is closed, but the prepackaged-food-and-also-cosmetics-and-pills store is open, you can meet your prepackaged food needs there.

I think CVS-style shops are a uniquely American thing, no? I was pretty confused by them on first visiting San Francisco (why is this a combination of products that makes sense? Is the candy aisle right beside where you buy statins some sort of elaborate joke?)

I assume they sell candy for the same reason art supply stores sell candy -- it's easy to sell, because people like it.

The combination of products is basically "everything you might find at a 'supermarket' in another country, except for the food", and I assume it's that way because grocery stores are primarily dedicated to food. If you took the food out of a Carrefour, what would it be selling?

(We also have stores on the "full supermarket" model, Walmart and Target.)

This varies by locale. In San Francisco very little is open 24 hours.

San Francisco is a very strange case because effectively the entire population commutes from far away. Things aren't just not open 24 hours, they're also not open on the weekend.