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Grocery mayhem courtesy of PQ spin doctors? Nighttime grocery shopping in our province has fast become the ultimate patience-endurance test. Lately, evening trips to the local grocery store are characterized by navigating through aisles cluttered with abandoned carts and endless waits in mile-long check-out lines. What gives? Well, according to a Quebec law introduced in the early '90s, grocers are only allowed to have four employees in the store outside of "normal" hours. The idea is that the big grocery stores were permitted to stay open later--provided they kept staff to a minimum, thus allowing the deps and smaller shops to still compete for business. So after 9 p.m. on weekdays and 5 p.m. on weekends, you won't find more than a handful of cashiers to tally up your bill and you'll be hard-pressed to locate a butcher or baker or deli-sandwich maker. But for years the law was not enforced... until several months ago. "Enforcement of this law happened all of a sudden and it seems that it was timed to coincide with the provincial election," speculated Luigi (not his real name), a long time Provigo employee. "It's a Liberal [Party] law that only started to be applied by the PQ government six or eight months before the election. I think the PQ were trying to court the mom-and-pop store and ethnic dépanneur votes." Luigi's store was caught with 17 employees one evening last fall--a costly mistake for his employers, who had already been busted once before. An infraction of the law results initially in a warning. But subsequent infractions carry fines of $3,000 or more. --Dominique Ritter
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