I feel really bad for the people working in the drugstore now!
Just to be clear, the idea that weekly cyclicality in demand for labor, or any restriction on demand for labor hurts employee welfare makes little sense when the legislative efforts already focus on labor friendly restrictions on supply. In fact, one of the ways that unions served their members was by insisting that outmoded positions (eg. coal shoveler on a diesel-electric train) were still filled.
In general, labor interests are served when employers need more work done, and the supply of labor is constrained through things like limits to how many hours can be worked in a stretch without a break and when overtime pay is required. (I say in general, because everyone is also a consumer, so efficiency and productivity gains are not a net loss, they're a net gain)
The real question is: Will this will just create more jobs in the end? I am not sure though. Because, it will make life even harder for B&M stores. I already use only the local hardware store, and the bicycle shop as far as the local retail stores go. Even then the nearest bicycle shop closed last summer after many years of service.
Supposedly preachers lobbied the government to shut down the USPS on Sunday because people were hanging out at the post office instead of going to church.
http://atheism.about.com/b/2006/02/19/sunday-mail-service-in...
You can thank the Jews, the Christians, unions, Henry Ford, and the Great Depression.
When you start tracing the dependencies between organizations throughout the economy, you start seeing why having a widely shared set of shared working days and working hours actually makes quite a bit of sense from that perspective.
Obviously this sort of spread wouldn't work in every industry, but the idea that any "professional" should work from approximately 9-5 on M-F causes obvious lifestyle load balancing issues we could avoid by spreading it out much more were possible.
Maintaining sufficient overlap is partly a matter of individual schedule preferences, and it gets easier as amount of free time increases (though, obviously, at a cost of overlap in work time) and as scheduling flexibility generally increases. Currently, if my wife has a "9-5" and I am stuck working something with weekend shifts, my wife typically lacks the flexibility to shift her schedule to match mine. What I am most strongly arguing for is increased flexibility where it is feasible.
One factor is what type of deliveries your company does. Some delivery companies want to deliver to offices; most offices have receptionists and are open 9-5 so deliveries are quick and you don't have to make multiple delivery attempts, the parking and roads are usually good, and offices tend to be in densely populated areas so you don't have to drive too long. Offices aren't open over the weekend.
Another factor is the shifts your staff are going to work. You have to give people several days a week if you want to keep them skilled and stop them needing a second job. You need managers as well as drivers. So you don't just have to hire one day's more warm bodies, you need to reorganise all your existing employees' shifts too.
If your company has always done Sunday deliveries, and your drivers knew they'd be working Sundays when they signed up, that's all well and good. But if you have a bunch of people who signed up with a company that always gave them Sunday off, and you have to change that, that's going to cost you a lot of staff goodwill, a.k.a. money.
This disturbs me, just like forcing shops to open on the weekend. People need a break, and should have a break, just because you can't wait an extra day?
Sure, they have a choice to work, just as shop workers have a choice to work, they can always get a job somewhere else.
So by the same argument--but in reverse, only opening shops one day a week or even month would not destroy wealth generation, but would just reshuffle income?
Maybe that's why I live in France :-).
Fortunately, here in Italy, Mario Monti got rid of some of the rules about working on Sunday.
It is impossible to mandate that nobody work on any of the 7 days, because hospitals. So we already admit that some people will be working when most people are not - the question is whether we tell them to suck it up, society is going to ignore them forever, or whether we can re-arrange society so that the family of the ER doctor can also work Sunday and take Wednesday off to be together.
I am definitely one of those people. It seems like I always end up remembering to order something late Thursday night or Friday. When using my Prime membership's 2 day shipping on a friday, the package does not arrive until Tuesday. Is this ever going to change?
What exactly is the reason these shipping companies seem to go into a kind of hibernation over the weekend? Surely there are people out there who would be willing to work weekends (if the pay was right)? How much more would it cost them?