PARIS -- On the first day that nearly everything in France went on sale, employees of the upscale Bon Marche were stationed at the entrances offering cookies to customers as they stormed the glass doors.
The shoppers were ravenous - but not so much for sweets.
After months of planning, saving and strategizing, they couldn't wait to be set free in the most luxurious department store in France with prices slashed on every rack and in every bin.
The same was true later across town in more pedestrian shops on Boulevard St. Denis, where Silvia Atisso and her sister were pawing through racks of winter coats priced at $29.35 each.
"We wait for the sales so that we can buy everything that we've seen during the year for a much lower price," said Atisso, 37.
In America, merchants hold sales whenever they like. In parts of Europe, the government makes the rules. Twice a year, in winter and summer, French law allows retailers to post the word "sale" in their windows and significantly cut prices.
The government sets the dates, and for four to six weeks, there is mayhem. The usual French decorum is dropped as shoppers, who on an ordinary day wouldn't dream of eating lunch or drinking a cup of coffee on the streets the way Americans do, gobble baguette sandwiches as they race from shop to shop.
Which sort of explains why Bon Marche was giving out treats at 8:30 the first morning.
"People get so worked up anticipating the low prices," a worker said as she gingerly handed cookies to the incoming herd. "The last thing we want is for them also to be hungry."
Not only are out-of-season sales banned in such countries as Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece and France, but a jungle of regulations also keeps European retailers in lock step.
In most countries, retailers can't sell below cost; in others, they can't advertise reduced prices in advance of sales nor discount items until they have been on shelves more than a month.
A recent study in France explained that these bans were conceived to preserve le jeu loyal de la concurrence, or "the loyal game of competition." Almost like a duel at dawn, fair competition isn't considered possible without regulation to set a time and place for it. They have long been intended as an orderly orchestration by the state to allow merchants to clear out old stock and bring in new collections.
Such restrictions help explain why in France and in the rest of the euro zone, consumer spending is expected to account for about 56 percent of the gross national product in 2007, compared with 70.3 percent in the United States, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
Germany scrapped the last of its sales restrictions in 2004, freeing retailers to offer discounts any time. Now, France looks poised to make some changes.
President Nicolas Sarkozy appears to be as ravenous for structural reform as shoppers at Bon Marche were for bargains, and he has promised to lift sales restrictions and other regulations.
While they were intended in part to preserve France's quality of life and inhibit competition, they have contributed to economic stagnation. France's GDP growth fell from 2.2 percent in 2006 to 1.9 percent in 2007.
Geraldine Baum writes for the Los Angeles Times.