Bears Win! $810 Million Productivity Loss… January 22, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Chicago, The Cultural Conversation , add a commentWow! The Bears win and we are off to the Super Bowl after a 21-year drought! Good news for all Bear fans but bad news for employers, or so says a human reource consulting firm. According to consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc., football fans pondering the matchup between the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts, or planning Super Bowl XLI parties, or deciding their picks in the office pool, may reduce productivity by $16 million per minute! (that a lot of Tostito’s and dip!).
Chicago could be hit especially hard, the report said. The Super Bowl will be played in Miami on Sunday evening, Feb. 4 and Challenger estimated that 90 million people will tune in to the game. Using figures about the national employment rate and average pay, the analysts calculated that employers around the nation will pay football fans $162 million for every 10 unproductive minutes they spend discussing the game or reading about it online. Multiplied by the five work days between next Monday and the game, that amounts to $810 million — $73 million paid to 3.9 million people in the Windy City alone. And that’s not taking the current week into account.
However, this productivity loss is less than the 16 day run of the NCAA “March Madness” basketball tournament, which annually costs the nation’s employers about $3.8 billion, while they were focused on last year’s tournament instead of their jobs. Read the article here.
