Relaxing the part of the Shop Trading Hours Act which embraced Easter Sunday was inevitable when one considers the changes across the great retailing landscape over the past few decades.
There once was a time you could not buy alcohol of course on a Sunday (unless you knew the bar owner and the secret knock he passed on to trusted imbibers).
Now the wines and ales and ciders take up a large slice of supermarket floor space.
And the Napier City Council's announcement on Wednesday that they had voted to relax the Easter Sunday trading standards may cause some of the region's more, shall we say, "mature" residents to smile.
For once upon a time, through until around the mid-1960s, the dear old corner dairy proprietor was barred from selling certain items on a Sunday...among them some lines of cleaners and soap powder.