Daylight Saving: Changing Clocks Costs Americans $18m

Daylight Saving Time already loses American companies money through cyberloafing, but it’s not only arsing around on Facebook that causes the pennies to disappear.

Yahoo! got its abacus out and discovered that Daylight Saving Time loses America $18m just by people changing their clocks.

The site points out the U.S. Census Bureau features 311 million Americans and 111 million households. Reportedly, American homes have an average of four timepieces per household that need to be manually reset. From there, the math is pretty straightforward:

The Census Bureau shows 111 million households, meaning there are approximately 445 million clocks that have to be manually changed. If it takes 10 seconds to change the time on each clock, then Americans spend, collectively, each spring and fall 1.2 million hours changing clocks. At a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, that’s $18 million.

Add this reason to the longass list of Reasons Why DST Sucks (disrupted sleep patterns, increased traffic accidents and lower employee productivity being other factors), and you have to ask: why do we still cling to this ancient idea?

Other countries have already picked up on this – for the past two years, Russia permanently canceled daylight saving time for all nine of its time zones, after then-President Dmitry Medvedev argued there was too much potential for “stress and illnesses.” Others who don’t waste time twiddling around with clocks include Puerto Rico, Saskatchewan and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Does all of this point to DST facing an inevitable demise? Let’s hope so.

[Via Yahoo!]