Today was actually a holiday here in the province of BC, and usually for a lot of businesses, that means you have to pay employees statutory holiday pay. As well, a lot of businesses either close early or close for the whole day. But interestingly enough, this happens a lot where sometimes, when it comes to occasions that people don’t really follow up on, they have no clue it’s actually a statutory holiday, and so they go about their regular shopping and they’re just surprised because a lot of places are closed or have less staff, as an example. And it makes you think, because a lot of businesses actually keep running regardless of the holiday, and a lot of people prefer to work on those days because they don’t, let’s just say, participate in certain holidays, for example.
I know it’s really common around Christmas time where you would expect most restaurants to be closed, but when it comes to things like Chinese restaurants around here, they’re always open, just because I suppose traditionally they remained open during holidays because they felt, for one, a lot of people don’t necessarily celebrate Christmas the same way as many other people do, and from a business perspective, if everyone else is closed, then you get all of the potential customers, so that’s good for the business.
But at the same time, there’s some people who say you should close down your business for every single statutory holiday just to show that you are part of the local culture, per se. Now, whether or not one could argue that a person is just treating it like a business and trying to make a profit versus in some way saying they don’t value the culture they’re around, I don’t know if it’s really that black and white. But at the same time, if people aren’t really too into a certain holiday and they’re willing to work, and there are people looking for that service from the business, I don’t really see an issue with that in general.
There’s plenty of times actually where people close down their businesses not because of a holiday, but because they want to, for example, attend some kind of event, like watching a sporting event, and people think that’s crazy because you’re missing out on so much opportunity in terms of all the traffic that you could potentially get.
Is it just one of those things where it comes down to business when it comes to a holiday, or do you kind of treat it more as a thing to say everyone should get a break during that time regardless? Ultimately, everyone’s different, and every business caters to different people as well. I think that’s one of the good things about living in a place like this. You should have, I guess, the freedom, per se, to make a decision in that regard and I don’t think there’s really a wrong or a right in that sense.