In Italy until recently, you could not get your hair cut on a Monday. You could not close a bank account without paying a hefty fee. You could not sell your motorbike unless a notary drew up some tortuously worded contract.
That is from The Financial Times, 28 February 2007, p.13.
All true. And it’s still illegal to bake fresh bread on Sunday.
Together with the good reforms FT cited, the italian government decided that:
- the prepayment of a mortgage should be always possible without paying a fee
- telecoms cannot ask customers a top-up fee when buying credit for their mobile calls
I think that the government should have rather promoted competition between banks and between teelcoms. You may say that limiting the world of possible variations on mortgage contracts and top-up fees is a way to promote competition. Anyway I am not surprised that some of the telecoms that abolished their top-up fees increased the fees for calls.
My admittedly limited experience in Italy is that it has lots and lots of
laws and no one pays any attention to any of them.
Its not so crazy you cant get a haircut in Italy on Mondays. I don’t know if that was law or just a common practice. But in many good salons in the US, Canada and the UK this is the same – they are closed. The rest of us get 2 days off a week, they get two off as well just they are Sunday and Monday.
Perhaps the author only goes to Supercuts to get their hair ‘done’
Having went to business school in Milan I can attest to the Italians superhuman levels of red tape but there are 100 examples better than haircuts.
All the barbershops in my neck of Massachusetts are closed on Mondays. But then, all the barbers here are from Italy.
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