Foreign Perspectives

In common with most things in France, the dead hand of government is evident here and shops are only allowed to have sales on set periods each year so the “Boxing Day sales” can’t start until January 10th and will end on February 17th (up to the 20th in some Departments). It is, of course, typically French to have overlly strict government regulation where much less is required and, of course, to ignore everything outside France. Amazon France seems to get away with ignoring the limitations on sale dates although I imagine that’s only because the French regulators haven’t gotten around to looking at the Internet site yet.

Unfortunately, that date means that each year the shops locally lose a considerable amount of business as many Spanish come here for their Dia de los tres Reyes (day of the three kings) on January 6th. In Spain, January 5th is effective Christmas Eve and the children receive their presents on the 6th (though globalisation means that they generally get presents on Christmas Day too these days).

One of the things that we did ourselves, in common with a considerable number of French who live around here, was to check out the pre-Christmas offers in Spain. Among several things that we bought there was the lovely little Nikon S10 (the updated version of the S4) for EUR 299 vs the £405 (about EUR 600) that Jessops in Belfast were asking for the outdated version. Of course, that means that we paid the slightly lower Spanish taxes rather than the French ones and naturally such practices mean that the French customs people create a massive backlog of cars at the border point with a view to illegally attempting to recover the French tax from people. In fact, the French government seem to be the only one on the continent that’s ignorant of the fact that no additional tax is payable on personal imports from another European country.

So, sorry if you were looking forward to some Boxing Day sales in France but at least you’ve not long to wait now.

For instance, if you go to most Christian countries in the world in the run-up to Christmas you’ll see little nativity scenes in the streets and shopping centres. Not so in France. Here the decorations are devoid of any religious symbolism. In fact, it seems to be entirely aimed at helping the shops sell more. OK, there’s a whole lot of marketing going on in other countries at this time too and perhaps the Christian message doesn’t get such a high profile as it should but at least in the other countries you do get reminders of the meaning of Christmas through the decorations in the shops and the nativity scenes put on by everyone.

Here in Catalonia that seems particularly odd because just across the border in the Spanish Catalunya all those symbols are in evidence everywhere as you can see from this nativity scene in one of the shopping centres.

That absence makes for a certain lack of Christmas spirit too. In other countries, the post office work flat out right up to midnight on Christmas Eve and don’t leave anything in the sorting centres if they can possibly avoid it. Here, they couldn’t care less and Christmas presents often aren’t delivered until a week or more after Christmas Day. As always, France get these things the wrong way around: in Spain we were given a calendar to say thank-you for choosing to eat in the Dong Xing restaurant in Girona yet in France the postal workers are quite insistent on you buying their calendars for a service which they clearly don’t follow through with (consequently Wendy’s decided that she will be equally insistent on not buying it next year).

In Belfast just about every shop window has a “help wanted” notice. In France, I’ve yet to see one.

How does that square with the 35 hour week in periods coming up to the likes of Christmas? That’s a very good question as clearly the shops are considerably busier over the pre-Christmas period than they are normally. In Belfast which doesn’t have the 35 hour limitation and few limitations on overtime, they still want more staff over peak shopping periods yet France doesn’t seem to require them or at least doesn’t advertise the vacancies. There certainly are vacancies though, but what happens in some shops is that the queues just get longer and longer. Even in normal times, we have twice abandoned our trolley in Leclerc after seeing a 45 minute plus queue for all the checkouts; I wouldn’t even consider going there at this time of year.

Other services similarly slow to a crawl. The French post office received orders from Amazon on December 12th yet hadn’t managed to deliver them by December 23rd.

Perhaps you are thinking that the jobs are advertised at the equivalent of job centres? They may be, but it’s not possible to register with those centres over this period as the interviewers in ASSEDIC who are the gatekeepers to these centres don’t seem to turn up for work themselves.

So unlike in the rest of the world, there doesn’t really seem to be much in the way of Christmas employment. Even the Santas just move from their normal office so that’s not even an extra job!

That applies to pretty much everything in fact. In a French supermarket, you get French cheese. In a UK supermarket you get UK cheese, Swiss cheese, German cheese and, of course, French cheese. Whereas even the largest French supermarket has only a tiny “ethnic” foods section, a typical UK supermarket doesn’t have an ethnic section at all because the food in the aisles is from everywhere. There are hardly any Australians living in Belfast yet it’s possible to buy Vegemite in Tesco; in France you’d need a really major supermarket to stock it.

Some would say: why shouldn’t it be French food in France? Well, obviously you would expect to have more French food in France than anything else but in every other country in the world you seem to get a reasonable representation of a selection of other cultures. The closed mentality in France makes that the rare exceptions to the “France only” rule very pale in comparison to the equivalent elsewhere.