Walk into the Costco in Teterboro on a Sunday afternoon and you will see something that makes sense only if you already live here. The rotisserie chickens are stacked and moving. The produce aisle is full. But turn toward the clothing racks and you will find them wrapped in plastic or roped off with tape, as if the polo shirts themselves were a crime scene. Target does the same thing a few miles away. Nobody working the register can fully explain it to a confused out-of-towner, but every regular knows the rule without being told: groceries, yes. Clothes, no. Not today.
That contradiction is Bergen County's Sunday in miniature, and this year it is being tested in a courtroom in Hackensack in a way it has not been tested in more than thirty years.
The Law Everyone Misquotes
The current version of the rule dates to 1959, when New Jersey let each county vote on whether to keep or drop its Sunday retail ban. All 21 counties held that vote. Eleven repealed on the spot. The other ten, Bergen included, chose to keep it. Over the following quarter century the holdouts peeled off one by one, until by 1985 Bergen was the only county left standing.
What the law actually restricts is narrower than most people assume: clothing, furniture, appliances, and building materials. Groceries, pharmacies, gas stations, restaurants, jewelry, candy, garden supplies, and books are all exempt, which is why a Sunday trip to Costco or Target works at all. The exemption list even carves out video game stores by name, a detail that tells you the rule was written by people thinking about department stores and lumber yards, not about what actually fills a strip mall in 2026.
Enforcement, in practice, is not really countywide. It is Paramus. Bergen's law applies on paper across all 70 municipalities, but the borough that has consistently policed it, litigated it, and built a national reputation around it is the one that's home to Garden State Plaza, Paramus Park, and Bergen Town Center.
A Stricter Rule Inside the Rule
Paramus does not just follow the county's Sunday ban. It has its own ordinance on top of it, on the books since 1968, that bans nearly all types of work on Sundays, with exceptions only for grocery stores, gas stations, pharmacies, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues. That local layer is why Garden State Plaza, Bergen Town Center, and Paramus Park sit dark every Sunday even when the county rule alone might leave more room to maneuver. Bergen County's own tourism office confirms as much, noting that Paramus strictly observes the law while other Bergen communities simply adhere to the restrictions in a looser, more voluntary way.
Outside Paramus, compliance has always looked more like a norm than a policed fact. The Shops at Riverside in Hackensack, a luxury retail strip anchored by Tiffany and Louis Vuitton, has operated on Sundays for years without the same scrutiny Paramus applies to its own malls.
The Property Line in East Rutherford
Then there is American Dream, and this is where the story stops being trivia and starts being a live legal fight with an actual timeline.
American Dream sits in East Rutherford, inside Bergen County, on land owned by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority. That single fact is the mall's entire legal defense. Its position is that because the land belongs to a state agency, county ordinances do not reach it, the same logic that already lets fans buy a Giants or Jets jersey inside MetLife Stadium during a Sunday game a few hundred yards away. By early 2025, more than 120 of American Dream's retailers were operating on Sundays in what Paramus considered a direct and repeated violation of the county law.
Paramus filed suit in August 2025, naming the mall's developer Ameream, Bergen County, East Rutherford, and the NJSEA as defendants, and asking a judge to force compliance and impose fines that escalate from $250 for a first offense up to $5,000 per repeat violation. County Executive Jim Tedesco has publicly backed the borough's position, saying the mall's operators had personally assured him it would honor Sunday closing before opening, a promise Tedesco says it broke. American Dream has called the suit a meritless political stunt driven by a competitor's interests.
The case landed in front of Superior Court Judge Gregg Padovano in June 2026, right as MetLife Stadium prepared to host World Cup matches. After a hearing that ran about ninety minutes, Padovano reserved judgment on whether to dismiss the case outright, telling attorneys he would issue an opinion shortly. The World Cup has since come and gone. In the months since that hearing, no ruling has been made public.
Where Bergen County Actually Stands on a Sunday
| Location | Town | Sunday Retail | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garden State Plaza | Paramus | Closed | County law plus Paramus's own 1968 ordinance |
| Paramus Park | Paramus | Closed | Same |
| Bergen Town Center | Paramus | Closed | Same, including its outlet anchors |
| American Dream | East Rutherford | Open | Argues NJSEA land exempts it from county law |
| The Shops at Riverside | Hackensack | Open | Outside Paramus's stricter enforcement |
| Grocery-anchored stores (Costco, Target) | Various | Partially open | Food and exempt goods sold, clothing and electronics cordoned off |
The Threat Buried in a Legal Brief
The part of this case that has not gotten much attention outside the courtroom is what happens if American Dream wins on the jurisdiction argument. Paramus's own borough administrator, Hector Olmo, wrote in a March 2026 legal brief that the managers of the borough's own malls told him they would stop following the blue laws themselves if American Dream keeps operating on Sundays unchecked. In other words, the businesses that have spent decades as the law's most visible enforcers are the same ones saying, on the record, that they will not keep absorbing a Sunday disadvantage if their competitor down the highway does not have to.
Sarah Swan, a Rutgers law professor who has followed the case, said the lawsuit draws "new attention to the question of whether the residents of Bergen County still want this law," and added that if they do not, the county could simply join the rest of New Jersey and let it go. That is the question sitting in front of Judge Padovano right now, and it is a bigger one than a single mall's Sunday hours.
Two Votes, One Answer, Getting Stronger
Here is the detail that cuts against the tidy version of this story, the one where an outdated law limps along only because nobody has bothered to kill it. Bergen County voters have had two real chances to repeal the blue laws and rejected both, by a wider margin the second time.
In 1980, the repeal effort failed 192,394 to 157,648, roughly 55 percent to 45 percent. In November 1993, the last countywide referendum on the question, voters rejected lifting the ban by a ratio of 2 to 1, close to 67 percent. Support for keeping Sunday closed did not erode between those two votes. It grew, even as the malls it was protecting got larger and the shopping options outside the county multiplied. Grassroots campaigns to force a new referendum have existed for years, but none has gathered enough momentum to get back on a ballot since.
What to Actually Do This Sunday
If you need clothing, furniture, or electronics on a Sunday and you live in Bergen County, your real options inside the county line are American Dream and The Shops at Riverside. Everything in Paramus is closed. If neither works, two workarounds sit just outside county lines: Palisades Center across the New York border in Rockland County, which carries the added appeal of no New York sales tax on clothing, or Willowbrook Mall in Passaic County, which has no blue law restrictions at all.
None of that changes until Padovano rules, and there is no telling yet which way it goes. What is worth watching is not just the outcome, but whether Paramus's own malls follow through on the threat in that March brief. If Garden State Plaza and Bergen Town Center start opening their doors the same Sunday the ruling comes down, that will tell you the county's oldest retail rule finally lost its last defenders.
Understanding a place at this level of detail, not just its price per square foot but the quirks that shape a Tuesday versus a Sunday there, is the kind of groundwork The Luberto Group puts into every conversation about Bergen County living. If you are weighing a move here, or already call one of these towns home and want a second opinion on what is actually happening around you, Contact Us.
