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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

This keeps cropping up. It sounds nice, particularly for nebulously-defined knowledge work. But, the usual:

- this only applies to task-focused jobs; e.g. the service industry still needs people to work all the time customers might turn up

- studies may have picked companies/orgs that are likely to have the foresight and talent to try a new way of working; this may not scale well to general work

- how do companies that have customers that work 5 days a week work this out? Do you need two people working overlapping 4 out of 5 days so they cover all 5 days for every customer-facing role?

- if people can do 5 days' work in 4, can they also do 4 days' work in 3? What's special about 4 days? Will work scope down until it becomes true that it could be done in 3 days, just as 5 days' work seems to have scoped down to be doable in 4?

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> - if people can do 5 days' work in 4, can they also do 4 days' work in 3? What's special about 4 days? Will work scope down until it becomes true that it could be done in 3 days, just as 5 days' work seems to have scoped down to be doable in 4?

My suspicion is that the time spent per week at work or 'doing' work is no longer the limiting factor for productivity in a vast swathe of knowledge economy jobs.

I have a theory that the human brain can only give-out so much creativity before it needs a bit of freedom to wander. I suspect that knowledge workers have big periods of time where their minds are effectively 'resting'/rejuvinating but these people are obliged to remain in the office and look like they are working.

Perhaps the four day week projects are showing that if people are given the choice, they can exchange some of that resting time for free time?

Or if you subscribe to David Graeber's bullshit jobs theory, if 80% of jobs are bullshit then what is the problem in reducing the amount of bullshit that needs to be done?

Four days of bullshit instead of five?

The problem is if that bullshit job is in the wealth defense category then billionaire A who makes his employees work 5 day weeks risks gaining an advantage over billionaire B who only makes them work 4.

But there might also be a positive effect on billionaire B's employees, who might be able to work even more efficiently than billionaire A's.

I noted a recent statistic, which states that the revenue of Chick-fil-A per outlet is more than the revenue of the next three fast food chains combined. And they're not even open on Sundays!

Surely that's explained by factors like the market segment they're in? Just by math alone you'd expect them to have 15% less sales from having less hours open. Maybe 20% if you factor in that Sundays has more traffic than other days of the week. But it's not as if them being closed on Sundays can plausibly boost productivity. They already presumably have people working in shifts, so it's not like each worker is working less hours.

Why is everyone so obtusely harping on the Sundays point?

Sunday is one of the days of the week with the highest sales. Chick-fil-A manages to make significantly more revenue in spite of their closure on Sundays. And what could be driving that? That was my point - that good corporate culture (which again does not mean 1-day-off) throughout the company has resulted in one billionaire enterprise out matching the rest.

I literally just mentioned the Sunday day off as a footnote, yet everyone seems to have harped in on that without the context of my parent comment.

Is being closed on Sunday what leads to round the clock lines at their drive-thru?

Chick-fil-A is very trendy and popular, and they don’t have enough restaurants to meet demand. The customers seem to be driving this, not being closed on Sunday.

If there were 2 equal restaurants, say 2 different McDonalds in similar markets, and one was open 6 days and another 7 days, would we see the Chick-fil-A effect? I’m betting not.

If this was the case, the Filet-O-Fish wouldn’t exist. It was developed by a McDonald’s owner in Ohio where the town was 85% Catholic, and didn’t eat red meat on Friday. He effectively only had a real business 6 days per week and was struggling. The fish sandwich was his answer and turned things around for him.

I received the impression that being closed on Sundays was part of corporate culture, a statement of valuing something other than maximizing value extraction. A poster here commented that the franchise agreements were unique in the poster's experience in having a flavor of partnership. Customer service seems to be emphasized.

B&H Photo seems to have a similar (even greater?) customer service drive. More than one poster here has commented that being closed on Jewish holy days (including Shabbat) is not a major deterrent given the quality of customer service and products.

Keeping one's word even when it hurts is a mark of virtue and integrity means such virtue is expressed in a breadth of life activity. Miracle on 34th Street hints on the advantage of "having a heart", even if Mr. Macy saw it as a corporate gimmick.

A McDonalds being closed one day a week because the managers like outdoor activities that day (or to try to achieve a Chick-fil-A effect) would see the ethos behind that behavior informing other behaviors.

Marketing can support a false reputation, but trust is important to social function. Betrayed (or mistaken if you are Roj Blake) trust wounds society.

Nope. I meant that in spite of being closed on Sundays, they managed to do higher revenue numbers. I really don't know how anyone could infer otherwise.

It's not the result of being closed on Sundays. The entire discussion was about how great working conditions can lead to higher business success. Check the parent comment to mine - Chick-fil-A was a direct counterexample.

If companies need to maximally be available to customers, then why aren't all customer-oriented businesses open 24 hours?

Customers are spoiled with cheap unsustainable wages, especially the service industry where people really don't want to put in 8/10 hour days but are doing that because there is no other option.

The equitable future of that type of work is appointment-based. Meaning you as the customer go into a website and make an appointment to do what you need to do--and if you really derive value out of having a person do something for you, then this should not be a problem including any charges associated.

It would work out great for e.g. retail returns; go on to an app, make an available appointment, upload your receipt, and then go do the exchange/return. No lines so a better experience for the customer, and it would also firewall-off invalid returns and a good number of abuse attempts.

A really good pizzeria not to far from me has moved to this model successfully. If you want a pizza, you grab a timeslot, then pick it up. You can't just walk in and expect to get one 30 minutes from when you walk-in at a random time (unless they're free). The pizza is that good. This won't work for low-quality products, of course.

> why aren't all customer-oriented businesses open 24 hours?

Because that's not the established pattern of work for existing business that are hard to change.

> The equitable future of that type of work is appointment-based.

I think the word "equitable" needs to be replaced with one with some meaning to it. The problem with your suggestion is: should city centres or malls only be populated with shops, cafes and restaurants that are by appointment only? How would that actually change anything regarding what the shop would like to do? They can be open 4 days a week and be appointment-only or walk in. But I imagine a shop that isn't by appointment only will in generally lose compared to a shop that isn't. A restaurant is about the only type of place that can already sustain the premise of appointment-only, and only then likely in a regulatory/property environment that makes it hard to start alternatives.

You're in a mall.

There are 4 shops. 2 require you to make an appointment using an app to pick up food, but the food is fantastic and you get the food when they agree to provide it. The lead time is usually 30 minutes during the busy lunch hour, so you can order before you go to the mall.

The 3rd shop is a McDonalds. They recently got an app and it's great, but ... the underpaid people there are rude, take a long time to prepare your food and half the time they are understaffed because no one wants to work there very long. The food used to be cheap but lately it's not much cheaper than the other places. You've complained about the service before but they tend to have a new manager every month, so you don't believe anyone cares.

The 4th shop has great Dominican food, and they are super friendly. The food is cheap, the service is good, the portions are huge, and it's awesome! But it suddenly closed after you saw ICE agents around one day.

Which is better really?

I don't understand what the benefit of appointments for a pizza is. I'd expect that a huge part of pizzas is sold to people who are walking there anyways. Wouldn't you loose them and they would just go to the pizzeria around the next corner? What is the benefit for the pizzeria beside the cost for operating a website and hiring/buying software (developers), because programming that website isn't really the same expertise as making pizza? Most times the pizzeria is just idle anyways. This won't change, because the customers still need to pick it up, so instead of just picking it up, they need to take time to visit a website and pick it up.

> - this only applies to task-focused jobs; e.g. the service industry still needs people to work all the time customers might turn up

This is a problem which service industry jobs have already solved by scheduling employees in shifts. A typical fast food restaurant may be open 18+ hours a day, 7 days a week, but they certainly aren't requiring each of their employees to work those hours.

This problem is only solved with a sufficiently large workforce willing to work evenings/nights/weekends, at sufficiently low prices.

For office work I don’t think many people care if they get the Monday or Friday off. Both are almost equally desirable.

While still knowledge work, when I started my career I was working as a sys admin in a data center. It required 24x7x365 support. No one worked 5 days. All weekday shifts were 4x10. All weekend shifts were 3x12.

It doesn’t get to a 32 hour week, but it does still give a 3 or 4 day working week. I don’t see why this wouldn’t work for other support or customer facing roles.

Many types of businesses are closed on random weekdays, Monday is a popular day to be closed for businesses that operate on that weekend, and they seem to make it work. Ones I’ve called often have an answering service for those days.

Where I was at, on holidays we’d run a skeleton staff of 2 people to keep things going, with on-call if anything big happened.

I don’t think anything is special about 4 days, just baby steps. I personally think I was most productive on the 3x12 schedule. It let me hyper focus on work, and really have long stretches of deep work without interruption, while also giving me adequate time to rest and recover from that. I think I’d get much more done if I moved back to that, personally. Working 5x8, as I do now, isn’t that useful. Half the day is full of meetings, and as soon as I start to dig into something, the day is over. What should take a day ends up taking weeks.

I’m not necessarily looking to cut hours, but more to get more heads down working time, without working free OT. I actually found 4x10 to be the worst, 3x12 was the best, for me.

> how do companies...

> Do you need...

> Will work scope down...

Sounds to me like a list of problems for market forces to solve.

My point is market forces will stick with 5 days.

This argument can be applied equally against the weekend so I'm not sure it holds that much water. We've figured out how to have people work 5 out of 7 days, what drastically changes if it becomes 4? What if it had always been 4?

But to answer your question about coverage, $dayjob handles that with an on-call rotation and moving shifts for customer support.

A 4 day work week is a great step in the right direction. These things can be figured out on a case by case basis--many businesses are already running on sub 5 day work weeks, or their work weeks are abnormal (Tues-Sun, Wed-Sat, etc.). But, yes, there will need to be some businesses who retain the 5 day work weeks.

However, the benefit is that a large percentage of workers will have an extra day per week to focus on family, hobbies, engaging in the local economy. That outweighs any of the concerns you bring up.

Most of the Netherlands banks have switched to 4 dat workweeks, sure you don't get as much work done on 4 days but it sure is nice to have an extra day off:)

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