As businesses emerge, they’ll need fewer silent nights

Christmas in July usually refers to a weekend of high-profile, big-money rodeos, but increasingly the Yuletide season is being used as a benchmark for business conditions.

Hard liquor sales in Montana posted “Decemberlike” numbers in March, reported public radio in that state, as Montanans apparently stocked up for a gubernatorial stay-at-home order before returning to holiday levels in April.

Canada Post, recycling firms and baking supply firms — yeast, flour, etc. — are reporting levels not seen since Christmas during the COVID lockdown.

The metaphor refers to consumption levels in a sort of bastardization realization of what the season is all about.

Yes, retailers depend on high volume of sales to make their year-end targets. And we all depend on the economy, we must begrinchingly admit.

This spring, businesses need a big bonanza after paying rent on a “closed” sign for almost two months. People need to get back to work. People need a haircut. It’s a fact.

Seven or eight weeks in the stir is enough to make even the most tedious of outings seem like a Easter parade, but didn’t we also used to complain about the Mondays, the hassles or the general lack of free time?

When this pandemic business started, in those chilly mid-March weeks, it was hard not to compare the sudden lack of activity, or even noise in neighbourhoods, even the lack of far off highway noise as the sort of silence usually reserved for a Christmas morning walk or Boxing Day.

It makes you wonder whether getting rid of “Sunday shopping” bylaws was such a great idea.

Religious arguments aside for a moment, you must admit it’s been nice at times to have nothing too important to get done and nowhere to be.

Yes, absolutely, it’s a hassle for everything to be closed all the time.

But wouldn’t it be a victory to come out of this having clawed back one seventh of our week for personal time not spent on shopping or other nonsense?

A look ahead

City council meets Tuesday at city hall, but also everywhere else on earth via the internet. The 6:30 p.m. meeting is not open to the public but can be viewed on the city’s website as well as Shaw-TV in Medicine Hat (Cable 10).

The city’s 2019 annual report will be presented, as well as the bylaws that formalize a tax deferral program and a public hearing will decide zoning issues for a potential expansion of a mobile home community near the southend community of the Hamptons (see the public notices page in this edition for details).