Quote:
Originally Posted by Boerseun
I think there might just be some merit in this, don't you?
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Of course its of tremendous merit, and in fact industries that are heavily capital intensive--manufacturing, petrochemical production, etc--have been doing it for a century. Many service industries do too: hospitals, hotels, mini-marts, etc. as well as police, fire and other emergency services. In fact in places where there's more manufacturing you'll find more 24-hour services because the demand is there from the manufacturing workers!
The problem is not so much the companies, but the fact that most people don't *want* to work second or graveyard shifts. They want to be able to go out with their friends at night or always have weekends free. Thus, unless you have real scarcity of jobs, people will demand to be paid more to work those shifts and weekends, and when the business is *not* capital intensive, it becomes cheaper to leave those assets idle because the incremental cost of operating them is not justified.
Further, as a feedback loop: since most people don't want to work or even be awake at those hours, service businesses that operate on demand (which is quite frankly most businesses), have no benefit to being open when customers are simply not around to demand the services.
Oddly enough in my business (software) you'll quite often find the buildings operating 24 hours a day, simply because programmers like to work whenever they feel like it!
Is there excess capacity? Sure, but that's not a bad thing, the converse of the situation you're describing is a fast growing economy, and if you don't have spare capacity you'll suffer horrible inflation!
Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?
Buffy
