Just shutting down for a month like many companies in parts of Europe is great. Means you don’t even have “time off work”, it means work doesn’t exist because no one else works either. You return after (at least) a month to an empty inbox.
The government is trying to convince companies to stagger their closures. Not closing would be a good start.
What changed?
Perhaps there is also higher income inequality between workers? I’m not sure about Italy specifically, but generally there has always been inequality, but it has usually between the upper class that didn’t have to work and the lower class that did. I would guess the upper class would holiday whenever they wanted? I would assume that now there’s a large group of middle class workers given time off at the same time, and they would be a lot more cashed up and in direct competition for accomodation and travel fares with the lower class workers.
So plenty of reasons that could be the case. I imagine the huge growth in international tourism meaning huge numbers of visitors would be the biggest contributor.
Checking Eurostat for nights spent at tourist accomodation
2007: 213 mn domestic 163 mn foreign
2018: 212 mn domestic 217 mn foreign
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/cbe7ecda-...
edit: Eurostat is great! Hotel occupancy is also up, indicating that prices should also have gone up. This is even in an environment with the rise of AirBnBs
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/9f9a92e0-...
What happens is the Telcos declare a brown-out/embargo [1] (in 2018 it was from 20 Dec to 7 January). The companies the next level up will follow (because they won't be able to do some network changes) and then the next layer up and so on.
The vast majority of other people will take breaks around the same time. Depends on the industry and what people are doing of course. But with many workers away the buses will run on weekend timetables and many CBD cafes will close.
[1] https://sp.chorus.co.nz/product-update/protecting-chorus-net... and https://www.telarus.com.au/news/month/nov/telco-embargoes-ma...
I don’t know what I’d do if it was impossible to hit pause for a couple of weeks like this every year.
This sucks for workers because you don't have flexibility on when you want to use your vacation.
Complete change freeze so you only need a minimum number of developers and ops people around. Although it is sometimes a good time of do that big CICD pipeline rebuild.
The lawyers, HR, finance and office support are down to minimal. Same with the cleaners (a good time to repaint the office though), internal IT, cafe and other support staff.
Sales will be down to minimal since all the customers will be on holiday. Customer support might be at normal or reduced level depending on industry.
Coordinated downtime can still be an advantage. It's actually a guiding principle in CPU scheduling systems as well -- so many cycles dedicated to processing vs. overhead.
Better to entirely curtail ops for a couple of weeks.
That tradition had largely continued to manifest even with the offshoring of wafer, disk, and chip production, through the 1990s and aughts, though it's been in a slow fade for a long time.
Service industries operate on a different clock, of course, but a scheduled downage can still be communicated.
Then there's Burning Man, when SF-SJ palpably empties out. New Years in August.
Maybe it would work for a dominatrix. "You are unworthy to see me for the next month, that will be $5,000, you may pay me now."
Since the whole country does this, customers are just fine with it.