Peter Sellars' incomparable Inspector Clouseau seems to have been the driving force behind the latest French initiative on business-on-Sunday. Dear to president Sarkozy, the initiative makes complicated the answer to a simple question: can a shop open on Sundays?

  • In shopping zones (they're called "exceptional consumption zones" in French; no kidding), stores can open on Sunday. Workers who elect to work on Sunday get two times the ordinary weekday wage. These zones are in urban areas with more than a million inhabitants. For now, they are in Paris, Aix-Marseille, and Lille, but not Lyon.
  • In tourist zones, shops of all kinds –not just leisure, sport, or cultural enterprises– can open on Sunday. Except that hypermarkets cannot. Workers get usual wages.
  • A city mayor can authorize stores in the city to open five Sundays a year, probably during sale periods. In this case, workers will be paid double-time.

The hodgepodge of rules and exceptions subject business openings to a lot of political decisions. They also make the situation extremely hard for business owners and workers to understand, because the rules change depending on where a business is and what workers do.