To complete our introduction we need to mention one final issue. Economics seeks to be a positive discipline: that is, one concerned with matters of fact not opinion. That Britain’s retail opening hours have become much more liberal over the last 20 years is a positive observation. Some shops now trade24 hours day every day. Twenty years ago, vary few shops opened on Sundays. Whether or not more liberal retail opening is a good thing is a normative question . The Archbishop of Canterbury probably has a view , one that is possibly at variance with the opinions held by the shareholders of Sainsbury’ s. Economists though do not claim to be able to answer such normative questions. What they can say is something about the impacts of this change: on retail employment for example, on the profitability of retail businesses, on the changing form of retailing- the development of e-commerce- and so on. These are all positive issues.