Supermarkets will be open in seven out of ten municipalities on New Year’s Day

It will be possible to buy groceries on January 1 in most places in the Netherlands. There is at least one supermarket open in seven out of ten municipalities on New Year’s Day, data from the site Openingstijden.nl, which was shared with ANP, showed. It does differ per municipality how many different supermarkets are open.

The site collected automatized opening times of 3,873 supermarket stores of all the well-known chains in the Netherlands. Around 40 percent of these are open on Wednesday, which is as much as there were on Christmas Day last year.

It has become more common for supermarkets to be open on New Year’s Day: this was only the case in five percent of the stores in 2015. But the number of stores opening has stayed around the same for the last few years.

The proportion of supermarkets that are open varies per municipality. Around 10 percent of the supermarkets are open in the municipalities of Vijfheerenlanden, Hoogeveen, and Zwijndrecht. Whereas people in Barendrecht and Zandvoort can go to all the supermarkets in the country.

Of the ten largest municipalities, Amsterdam, Almere, and Utrecht have relatively the most supermarkets open. A big outlier is Nijmegen: all supermarkets there are closed on January 1, except for a to-go branch at the main station. There will also be no supermarkets open in Emmen, Venlo, Almelo, and Heerlen, among others.

The supermarkets of the following chains were taken into account for this calculation: Albert Heijn, Aldi, Coop, DekaMarkt, Dirk van den Broek, Hoogvliet, Jan Linders, Jumbo, Lidl, Nettorama, Plus, Poiesz, and Vomar.