Why is everything in paramus closed on sunday

Helpful tips. Why is everything closed in Paramus on Sunday? Why is it illegal to sell fried fish on a Sunday? Can you browse in Asda before it opens? Can you buy before 11 on a Sunday? But Paramus both has the toughest blue laws in the United States—its Sunday-trading restrictions exceed the statute that applies at the county level—and lies in one of the top-ten zip codes for retail sales in the country.

The town also has a median household income more than twenty-five-thousand dollars higher than the figure for New Jersey. I asked him whether this amounted to resistance to consumerism. Kids play road hockey, skateboarders practice kickflips on open swaths of pavement, and you may suddenly notice the cawing of blue jays.

The locked Garden State Plaza, lost among its empty parking lots, seems vaguely apocalyptic. The scene is liberating, but also heavy with the demand that free time places on the self. You find yourself constantly checking your cell phone for messages. More than twenty-one years have passed since Bergenites voted on whether to keep their consumer sabbath. At the time, the result was unequivocal: nearly sixty-five per cent of voters backed the blue laws, pulling a majority in sixty-six of sixty-nine Bergen towns.

In Paramus, blue-law supporters outnumbered opponents thirteen to one. Last year, Modernize Bergen County tried to collect enough signatures to get a repeal on the November ballot.

After reaching its target of twenty-five hundred, the number that had been required to launch the referendum, the group learned that, under a blue-law-specific statute, the state requires pen-and-ink signatures from ten per cent of registered county voters in order to put the issue to referendum a second time.

It's the same county where Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield operates Garden State Plaza, one of the nation's top-performing malls. Yep, all closed on Sunday. The history of the blue laws dates back nearly 2, years, when Roman Emperor Constantine in A.

Until the s, blue laws prohibiting the sale of clothes, home goods, appliances and other goods were much more common nationwide. The name "blue laws," according to historians , comes from the fact that the Puritans tended to write their laws on blue paper.

New Jersey's blue laws, prohibiting work on Sundays, have been on the books since the s. That wouldn't really start to reverse course until the s, when each New Jersey county was granted the right to decide on blue laws.

Hudson County was the last one, outside of Bergen County, to repeal its blue laws, in the s. The decline in commercial blue laws nationwide can be partly attributed to the fact that big-box retailers like Walmart and Target were on the rise, and these chains didn't want to be closed on Sundays, according to Vicki Howard, author of "From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store.

Today, there are still various blue laws in place across the country today, but they're much more narrow. Even 'Jeopardy! This goes beyond my desire to get a new pair of shoes every Sunday though that would be nice or the ample jobs and tax revenue that would be created by a repeal.

My kids are really busy after school and growing like weeds. Our only time to get new clothes are weekends, and half of that time is gone because of blue laws. If Saturday is busy we get nothing done.

Same for furniture shopping with my husband or even getting lightbulbs from a hardware store.