Openness

My recent trip to USA has certainly been educating. I got many of my presumptions confirmed over there, but I’d have to revise some of them. Which is good. I like to get my perceptions and paradigms challenged. Reminds me that I’m not perfect.

Nevertheless, I am impressed by American society in many ways. Sadly, I live in a very anti-American society (socialists does not like America, for obvious reasons), a country where “American conditions” means something like “too much”, “outrageous”, “superfluous”, “absurd” and other things like that. “We do not want American conditions” is (sadly) a rather common thing to hear.

I admire the freedom of American society. I am, as you might realise by reading my blog, somewhat of a liberalist. I don’t think that the state should legislate and make rules for all aspects of life.

In Denmark, we have a lot of that. Let’s take a small example:

Years ago, one of the largest discount supermarket-chains in Denmark, Netto, decided that they wanted to make a new concept. Since the Danish legislations has strict rules about when a shop is allowed to do business, the regular Netto stores have to close rather early, especially during the weekend (large stores are only allowed to be open a limited number of sundays each year), they wanted to make a chain of stores that were smaller and thus able to be open longer.

Good, most people in Copenhagen though (since they’re only in and around Copenhagen). Now we can get what we need in the evening without having to resort to really expensive places like 7-Eleven. So, it was a great success. Too great, it seems.

The law that regulates when stores are allowed to be open is mainly based on turnover. So since the stores where such a success, they crossed the line with large turnovers in 2006, so now, in 2007, they are forced to revert to closing early this year, in hope that their turnover will be low enough this year to allow them on the good side again in 2008.

So now we have the (aptly named) “DøgnNetto” (Døgn is a full day and a full night, implying that the store is open 24/7) that closes at 5 pm. on Saturdays and Sundays.

That’s just silly.

By the way, as you shouldn’t have noticed, I changed server for this website the other day. Now it’s much faster.