Zaandijk has 32 places, of which 24 give opening hours, 75 per cent. Of those, 79 per cent open on a Sunday and 21 per cent work past eleven. A website of their own is held by 69 per cent, and 31 per cent have no online presence.
The by-law of Zaanstad sorts hospitality not by days but by weight. Light premises must shut from midnight, middle and heavy ones from two, and that holds for every day alike. Those who have signed the hospitality covenant may run until five, but let nobody new in after three. Terraces depend on where they stand: inside a concentration area the hours are wider than outside it.
The best known thing here is not quite here. The Zaanse Schans stands across the water and belongs administratively to Zaandam; that the railway station is called Zaandijk Zaanse Schans only deepens the confusion. The houses were moved there between 1961 and 1974, and in 2024 it drew 2.6 million visitors.
Zaandijk itself began on 20 September 1494, when a villager was given leave to build on the low dike along the Zaan. It was called something else at first. Paper was the trade: thirteen paper mills once stood here. It was a municipality of its own from 1811 until 1974.
Zaandijk mustard is a regional product without a European name. The place has 8,868 inhabitants, of whom 23 per cent are over sixty-five.