Business's Brush With the Blues

Uproar Over Resurrected Va. Statute Highlights Sunday's Retreat From Sabbath to Shopping

Time was, a shopkeeper caught doing business on Sunday could wind up paying a fine or even spending the night in jail.

These days, to hear business owners and lobbyists tell it, failing to serve shoppers, diners and drinkers seven days a week is akin to economic malpractice.

Just ask Joe Rillo, acting president of Rillo's Restaurant in Carlisle, Pa., a family-owned Italian eatery that once shut its doors on Sundays, figuring people wanted to stay at home.

Now, Sunday is the restaurant's third-biggest day of the week.

"It's definitely a mainstay for us," Rillo said. "People come in from a little further away. They have time to travel. A lot of times it's families coming for special occasions. We have regulars who come every Sunday."

The panicked reaction among Virginia businesses to the state's accidental resurrection of an old "blue law" allowing employees to demand Saturday or Sunday as a "day of rest" highlights the extent to which the U.S. economy now relies on a seven-day week.

It also illustrates the cultural distance the nation has traveled from its Puritan roots, when Sunday meant observing the Christian Sabbath and staying far away from the workplace.

Blue laws, which date to colonial New England, have been under assault for at least a generation, mainly from business groups eager to take advantage of what has become a major shopping day for increasingly over-worked and over-scheduled American families.

"The moment when we secularized Sunday . . . happened a long time ago and it's highly unlikely at this late stage that we can consider any sort of return," said Witold Rybczynski, author of "Waiting for the Weekend."

According to data from research firm ACNielsen, Sunday has become one of the biggest shopping days of the week, with close to 17 percent of all grocery store trips and over 18 percent of all trips to big chain stores such as Wal-Mart and Target taking place that day.