Foreign Perspectives

The French, by and large, take all their holidays between July 14th and August 18th (ie the penultimate Saturday in August).

This causes endless hassles for everyone in the accommodation industry in France. For one thing, just about everywhere is running at full capacity right up to August 18th and then all of a sudden they can be virtually empty. Stocking up is consequently a nightmare as on one hand you don’t want to run out of stuff, on the other hand you don’t want to be left with loads of perishables on August 19th.

The effect on the cash & carry is peculiar. Metro locally have truly awful stock control so now that the bulk of the holiday season is out of the way they now have the little soaps in stock which haven’t been on the shelves anytime since early July. You can tell that we’re not quite at the end of the main holiday season though because they still haven’t got any of the little bottles of shampoo and instead are still sitting with the same 20 boxes of body lotion (I was very tempted to mark the boxes to confirm that they are the same ones that have been there since June).

Anyway, one useful side-effect of this peculiar behaviour of the French is that a lot of places like ourselves can actually close for the final week of August and lose virtually no business.

Where’s everyone else though? Who knows? The English do keep coming during that final week in August and by the first week in September things are getting back to normal with the usual blip locally caused by the Visa pour L’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan and various other events around the country designed to sort things out.

However, by mid-September the bulk of beach resorts are starting to close down for the Winter, despite there being high numbers of tourists (but few French ones) around locally until well into October.

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