Consume Product

People are simultaneously "working" too much while not getting any actual work done. When your workplace has more middle men and bureaucrats than actual workers, its sick. Medieval europe had the correct work-life balance because people were working to survive and not working to consume product.

Most stores here *are* mom and pop shops. There aren't any Walmarts. You can go to a carrefour or a lidl of course, but the most convenient option is almost always guaranteed to be some mom and pop store right next to your house. That's the main kind of store that I and everyone else I know shop at. Big box stores are for large grocery trips or for things that you can't purchase at the local shops

And most of the time shopping is not being done on Fridays anyways.

I don't think this will hurt mom and pop stores very much. I just think it's bread and circuses to placate the growing anger among the masses.

Pensions and benefits are also usually pretty rigorous here because of general outrage whenever something to that affect is infringed upon.

It's extremely difficult or nigh on impossible for big retail to kill small business in Europe for one main reason: geography. Everything has already been inhabited since before these stores existed, and there's very little space to even build large stores a la Walmart anywhere. The only thing they could do is branch into the same locations that small businesses already occupy but then that defeats the whole purpose of a Walmart or a best buy, because in this case they wouldn't be able to sell a fraction of what the large stores sell.

Unless they were to start demolishing cities to build huge big box stores. But when this happens we will have a bigger problem than mom and pop shops going away.

That's the whole point. They've burned through our pensions to maintain their socialist corruption. Now they have to do anything to reduce expenditure just to keep afloat on the coming recession. We'll never see one cent of what we forcefully paid to the system.