In the summer of 2015, an online surf brand, Tower, took the business world by storm when its creator rolled out an initiative entitled “Summer Hours.” In the spirit of embracing the outdoor lifestyle brand, the Australian based company officially adopted an 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM work day: five hours. The experiment yielded wonderful results for Tower, seeing a revenue increase of forty percent the following year after adopting the schedule full time. But Tower was a group of ten people with an online point-of-sale, a compact setup for any company of course. The real question is simply: Can any company handle the switch or would too much desperately needed time be lost in the process?

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By entertaining the idea of such a short work day, company leaders are acknowledging that their system of production, no matter what they may be producing, is inefficient enough that it can be considerably trimmed and condensed. For a company like Tower, the trimming process was relatively easy. Tower, at the time, was a group of ten people working in close proximity to each other and all working to crank out paddle boards to fill orders. Communication time was instant. Meetings could be planned and called instantly if needed. All sales were conducted online, so the orders were sent straight to their database with no need for people to slow down the process. Because Tower did not have a location, they had no consideration for staffing a store, which certainly cannot be open only five hours a day. Tower had one of the simplest business models imaginable, so making all their processes more efficient would likewise be very simple. For a more complex company that must worry about more than how many paddle boards it can produce, achieving such a level of efficiency is much more difficult.

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Any company that interacts with people to meet their needs is highly restricted in its hours of operation, especially at peak hours. A car dealership, for example, has little hope of moving to a five-hour work day. The service and sales departments of most dealerships are always busy and often have a line queuing. Anything in the service industry, for that matter, is restricted, by definition, from ever going down to just five hours. The service industry is built on serving the convenience of other people, being open only from 12:00-5:00, 9:00-2:00, or even 1:00-6:00 is hardly being convenient for anyone. But just as a thought experiment, suppose a place like a dealership was only open five hours every day, what would happen? Service is likely to increase greatly to compensate for the lost time, which means that instead of an establishment having “peak hours” of service, they would have more a “peak day”. A typical dealership service department does not have the manpower to service the magnitude of vehicles that would come through in that time. Even if one did have enough men, the issue then is that no service department or shop has enough space to hold and attend to more than five or six vehicles at once. This pattern of logic applies to all the service industry. Insurance claims adjusters would not have enough time to assess every claim, delivery men would not have enough time to deliver, and restaurants would not succeed for obvious reasons. In a service based economy, more time devoted to meeting people’s needs means more money. Cutting hours, even if the work speed increases, means losing money.

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Going back to take another look at Tower, one can notice that the only major task that Tower needed to accomplish was manufacturing paddle boards. Of all the processes to analyze and make more efficient, production lines are way ahead of the crowd for simplicity. And for a group of people that all know the process intimately, it should be no wonder that so much time was able to be cut from the task. The manufacturing industry in America shares little with Tower. Since 1990, the manufacturing sector has dropped by a figure of six-million, yet the total output has increased. How? Automation. Machines do not need to be paid nor provided with health care, so they have been rapidly implemented. At the same time manufacturing jobs have gone down, employment in the health-care segment have doubled, from 9 million to 18 million in 2018 (Washington Post) and retail is still the highest employment sector in over 20 states. It is not difficult to see that the jobs that run our country are service based, which means that they cannot be condensed into a five hour work day. Health-care workers cannot simply hustle to get things done like men on an assembly line. The American economy is nearly entirely dependent on how much time can be spent helping other people. Because the amount of people that will buy the service you provide is nearly infinite, there will always be work to be done, which means that streamlining to five hours is out of reach.

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For small businesses, like Tower, whose bottom line is dependent on how much their crew of people can manufacture each day, increasing efficiency and having three extra hours every evening may be within grasp. But I can see no reasonable way for any company, large or small, that interacts with and deals with people, to make them happy and meet their needs, to create such streamlining and realize the same yield as Tower. Any business in the service industry, and especially a service economy, is bound to as much time it can give, which must be more than five hours.