If you want to see aggressive competition and scenes of triumph and despair, the Indooroopilly Shoppingtown carpark on a Saturday afternoon is the place for you. After driving around the carpark for twenty minutes last Saturday afternoon, I was luckily able to find a park on the roof. A young boy, hopping out of a car that also found a park nearby, exclaimed “Finally!”

Hence I’m unsurprised to read about cases of poor manner and carpark rage at shopping centres across Brisbane in the Courier-Mail this morning:

Stolen parking spaces cause carpark rage as tensions run high during Christmas shopping

There are two obvious cost-effective solutions:

1. paid parking by the hour, to encourage people to use their time at shopping centres efficiently, thereby increasing turnover of carparks; and
2. deregulate retail trading hours, to provide people with a wider time window during which to go shopping, which should reduce the demand for carparks during peak times.

The Productivity Commission has affirmed its commitment to deregulated trading hours in its final report on the retail sector (p. 312):

Retail trading hours should be fully deregulated in all states (including on public holidays).

UQ Emeritus Professor Geoff Kiel will be pleased the Commission has relied on his 1994 study of retail trading hours, which found no adverse impacts from the deregulation that had occurred up to that time (p. 309):

The ABS data from 2008-09 on business counts supports previous research undertaken by Kiel and Haberken (1994). They examined the hypothesis that increased trading hours will reduce the number of small businesses by comparing the number of retail establishments in ABS retail censuses and changes to trading hours using a statistical analysis. Their analysis found that there was no obvious or immediate connection between shop opening hours and the number of retail establishments or that the number of shops increased or decreased at the same time as trading hours increased.