Netto, the country's most popular discount supermarket chain, is expanding its opening hours at some of its city centre shops so they will be open around the clock in the future. 

From December 5, Danes will have the opportunity to shop all day and night at three stores: at Rådhuspladsen in Copenhagen, on Engelsborgvej in Lyngby and at the Aarhus Hall in Aarhus.

The initiative has been called "the last nail in the coffin" of lukkeloven, the law regulating opening hours, by an expert on consumer affairs.

Larger piece of the cake
"When the law regulating opening hours in shops was abolished, customers' buying patterns changed quite dramatically," Netto's country manager, Brian Seemann Broe, told Berlingske.

"We can see that sales are increasing during the last few hours before the stores close at 10pm, and we have also seen more and more turnover at our shops that open at 7am."

According to an expert in consumer trends and retail, Flemming Birch from the consulting firm Birch & Birch, Netto is trying to take a larger piece of a pie that is never going to get bigger.

The estimated 1,600 discount stores in Denmark are "all fighting over the same pie, and it is not going to get larger", he explained Birch. 

"Netto has now served itself a whole new cake and the question is whether it's going to be big enough to pay off."

New stores on the way
Netto currently has a 19 percent share of the Danish groceries market. It belongs to Dansk Supermarked, which also runs Bilka and Føtex.  

Although the country is already flooded by cheap grocery stores, Netto has opened eight new shops this year and plans to open 15 more in 2015.