Government policy, regulations, and legal developments affecting global commerce and retail.
Selfridges Group chief executive Andre Maeder and Paul Smith chairman Ewan Venters have called for Sunday trading hours in England and Wales to be extended by two to three hours. The 1994 law has seen off three reform attempts, and independent shops and the union Usdaw are already lined up against a fourth.
From 1 October 2026 the tribunal claims window doubles to six months, and from 30 October every UK shop becomes liable for customer harassment of its staff unless it took all reasonable steps. Here is what independents and chains must do before the deadlines.
The Justice Department has expanded its beef antitrust investigation from meatpackers to eight of the largest US grocery retailers, seeking pricing, cost and margin data covering 2020 to 2026. No retailer has been accused of wrongdoing.
The FTC pushed the comment deadline on its proposed personalized pricing enforcement policy statement to September 25, 2026, seven days later than planned. The proposal would require retailers to disclose when a price is individualized, why, and what data feeds it.
Nuvei will pay $4.85 million to settle FTC charges that it opened and kept merchant accounts for schemes it knew were defrauding consumers, including more than $30 million processed for the Reimage tech support scam. The accompanying commissioner statement sets a knowledge requirement for payment processor liability for the first time.
Connecticut’s SB 4 and Maryland’s HB 895 both take effect on October 1, 2026, the first live US compliance date for surveillance pricing bans. Connecticut adds a mandatory all-caps price disclosure; Maryland limits its ban to grocery-selling establishments of at least 15,000 square feet.
A Stanford, MIT and University of Chicago working paper finds SNAP sugary drink restrictions cut those purchases by 12.4 percent in the first half of 2026. Researchers found no own-cash substitution, but up to 39 percent of redirected spending moved into juices and energy drinks where those stayed eligible.
The FTC and 22 state attorneys general sued Amazon on August 31, 2026, alleging a hidden “soft reserve price” surcharge turned its second-price ad auctions into first-price ones since 2019. The complaint says the scheme extracted tens of billions of dollars from more than one million brands and sellers.
The CFPB’s revised Section 1033 proposal entered White House regulatory review on 4 August 2026 and is likely to publish between late October and mid-December, with comments closing in Q1 2027. That timing means no enforceable US open banking rule binds merchants or their payment vendors through the 2026 holiday season, and probably not before 2028.
The EU’s harmonised legal guarantee notice becomes mandatory for every trader selling goods to consumers in the bloc on 27 September 2026, alongside the new GARAN durability label fixed by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960. Twenty member states remain under infringement proceedings for missing transposition, but the application date has not moved.