When the Sunday Trading Act 1994 was introduced, part of the rationale was to better reflect the changing needs of consumers - but today those needs are changing again .

UPDATED: This article was published by Retail Week in August 2014, 20 years after The Sunday Trading Act came into force.

When the Sunday Trading Act 1994 was introduced, part of the rationale was to better reflect the changing needs of consumers.

Coincidentally 1994 was also the year that Amazon.com, a company that would go on to play an influential role in changing the way we shop, was born.

Over the last 20 years, since the Sunday Trading Act was introduced, consumers’ needs and their shopping behaviours have continued to change.

In fact the process has accelerated in recent years due to the growth of new channels such as e-commerce and m-commerce, and with the wide-scale adoption of  multichannel retail models.

Sunday trading can mean many different things. Large food retail stores typically choose to open from 10am to 4pm, some retail park occupants prefer 11am to 5pm and other destination stores opt to open at 12 noon and trade until 6pm.

What this means for the consumer is that they can effectively shop from 10am to 6pm across a variety of locations. And of course smaller stores are exempt anyway.

Given this inherent complexity, it seems that when it now comes to a debate over extending Sunday trading hours the focus should really be on how our retail habits will change over the next 20 years, rather than whether stores need to open longer on a Sunday.

Consumers have embraced mobile technology. Our mobile phones are often the first thing we check in the morning and the last thing we see at night.

They have enabled us to shop from anywhere, at any time. 

They are shop windows, sales assistants and tills all rolled into one, and they fit snugly in our pockets.

We have also seen how the latest digital technology can turn a shop window, a bus-stop or a train station billboard into a shopfront, allowing stores to continue to trade even when they aren’t officially open. 

Then, once we’ve clicked, we can collect from an ever increasing range of locations, from schools and libraries to train and Tube stations – even the airport.

Some major retailers and delivery companies have already introduced Sunday delivery and we might expect more to follow.

It is possible now to receive our purchases when it suits us, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Fulfilment will increasingly become a key differentiator for retailers.

It’s all part of a move towards an increasingly customer-centric model of retail, focused on customer experience.

We are likely to see more stores adapting their opening hours to better suit shoppers’ needs and patterns of working, opening earlier in the morning and later at night.

Seeing how retail has changed in the last 20 years and looking at the decades to come, perhaps when a retailer considers its opening hours the question should be less about how long they are open for and more about when?

  • Ian Geddes is head of retail at Deloitte