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Comment by bendigedig | Hacker News Reader

> - 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?

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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.

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