The Leisure Economy

How Changing Demographics, Economics, and Generational Attitudes Will Reshape Our Lives and Our Industries

Linda Nazareth

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470675212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

For the past three decades, we have been steadily creating an extreme 'time-crunch economy' that has affected jobs, portfolios, businesses and lives. But the 'time-crunch economy' is turning into 'the leisure economy' and it will mean wrenching adjustments for our lives and institutions. Everyone from consumers, investors, businesses, and policy-makers will need to understand the changes afoot.

The Leisure Economy posits profound economic changes in North America due to both the retirement of the baby boomers and the attitudes of ascendant generations X and Y. Looking at trends in demographics, economics and generational change, this book looks at how to stay ahead of the leisure economy and predicts who will be the winners and losers in the seismic shift ahead.

1

THE COLOR-CODED REFRIGERATOR

Finally, the perfect calendar to help parents control the chaos! This superbly designed wall calendar provides ample room to record all the school activities, music lessons . . . carpooling schedules, team practices, and vacations of even the busiest family . . . the spacious daily blocks are divided into morning, afternoon, and evening . . . .

—Amazon.com description of The Thinkbin Family Wall Calendar 2004/2005: The Perfect Organizer for Busy Families, Large Deluxe Edition

“Three kids, three activities each, every week. That means soccer and T-Ball on Monday and swimming and music on Saturday—those are the double days. The other days are only single activity days. And we both work full time, of course. Theoretically we both get home in time for dinner at 6:30, but at least a couple of times a week one of us leaves the office late, and at least a couple of times a week one of us gets caught in traffic. I volunteer for a ton of activities at the kids’ schools—I guess it’s partly out of guilt, because I can’t be the one to take them to school every day. And I help out at the Sunday School too—we decided we wanted to take them to church, but if we were going to do that, we had to be involved.” Thirty-nine-year-old Allie,¹ a technical sales executive and the mother of three boys, barely pauses for breath as she rattles off her description of a typical week. “Leisure time? None. Absolutely none, not for us, or for me anyway. We are filled up, and over-scheduled and over-stressed every single waking minute of every day.”

As she speaks, Allie gestures to the calendar stuck on her refrigerator amidst the hodgepodge of photos, kids’ artwork, school permission forms and take-out menus. It’s not the kind an earlier generation got free from the local savings bank, with a neat square for each day of the week and just enough space to note the day that the milkman needed to get paid. Allie’s calendar is a serious study in organization, as indeed befits her advanced degree in computer science. The full-page photo that graced her mother’s calendars is gone, freeing up two pages’ worth of date blocks for each month. Each of those are divided into morning and afternoon sections, and within each of those segments are five separate rectangles—one for each member of the family. To further differentiate everyone’s activities, Allie uses different colors of ink, too. Red is for doctor’s appointments, blue is for school activities, green is for sports and black is for social events. Still, without looking carefully, it is hard to distinguish any particular hue. The calendar is a literal kaleidoscope, illustrative of the kaleidoscope of activities that is family life today.

Allie’s refrigerator is not an anomaly. Calendars with names like “Mom’s Family Organizer” or the “15-Month Super Family Organizational System” are everywhere, all with lots of squares (some even include stickers, with pictures of planes to denote trips, or soccer balls to mark “game days”). They are in kitchens across North America, with the appropriate scrawls across them. Stationery stores do a brisk business. Indeed, for households like Allie’s, picking up a calendar around New Years is more important than stocking up on hats and noisemakers. In a time-crunched society, navigating tools like fancy calendars are a necessity.

And a time-crunched society is what we are. The numbers actually tell a jumbled story, some actually suggesting that North Americans are awash in more leisure time than they have ever had. But the numbers lie: the proof is in the economy. From the growth in packages of pre-cut apple slices to the advent of online bill paying to the surge in home cleaning services, business initiatives that save people time have been the success story of the past two decades. If not everyone in North America is time-crunched, a big enough chunk of key consumers certainly are, and the economy has effectively been reconstructed to fit their needs. The lack of time is, in a sense, an important economic driver, one that has shaped the North American economy as much as population or income growth.

Despite the evidence, a debate still occasionally erupts as to whether we are actually time-crunched or if it’s just fashionable to pretend we are. In fact, both are true. We are time-crunched, and, oddly, many of those who are time-crunched see it as a status symbol. The time crunch is mostly a problem for the affluent, which is why it has created so many business opportunities to serve the needs of a world where leisure time is the scarcest resource.

MEASURING LEISURE TIME

By definition, being time-crunched suggests that we have a lack of leisure time in our economy. Like Allie, we have so many things scheduled that we have no time left over to do things that are relaxing. But the issue is muddied by the fact that part of what is crowding the calendar is a plethora of leisure activities. So coming to terms with exactly how time-crunched we are should perhaps start with a definition of exactly what we mean by “leisure.” Strangely enough, although there is a society-wide perception that we do not have much of it, there is no single accepted definition of what leisure actually is.

The strictest economist’s definition of leisure pegs it as being the opposite of labor market work: basically all non-labor market activities in which one’s labor services are not exchanged for money. In economic analysis, the decision of whether to take a job is often described as making a decision between work and leisure. By this measure, an individual who chooses to stay out of the labor market is said to have chosen leisure, no matter whether he is spending his time watching television or studying medicine.

And indeed, much of the dearth of leisure that we feel comes from the fact that we devote such a large part of our lives to our jobs. In North America, as in most industrialized countries, the percentage of the population that works at paying jobs has been increasing since the end of the Second World War. As of 2006, about 66 percent of all Americans and 67 percent of all Canadians—up from 59 and 54 percent respectively in 1960—were in the labor market. Family households are also much more likely to have both parents working—by no means a bad thing, but stressful for many. Still, although there are more people working, there is some evidence that they are working fewer hours than they used to. By most conventional measures, the average workweek has not increased over the past several decades. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1970, the average worker was putting in about 37 hours a week. In 2006, that had dropped to 33.9 hours.²

But the government statistics may not accurately gauge work and leisure hours. For example, a contrasting view of work versus leisure comes from economist Juliet B. Schor, whose thoughtful book, The Overworked American, was first published in 1992. In the midst of a devastating recession and with consumer and business confidence flagging, Schor put forth the thesis that Americans were more overworked than they had been since the 1960s. One of her assertions hit a national nerve: she suggested that Americans were putting in an extra month of work every year compared to how much they had worked a couple of decades earlier. According to her calculations, in 1969 workers worked an average of 39.8 hours a week. By 1987 (the last year of data she had available) she calculated that the average workweek had risen to 40.7 hours. Schor also asserted that workers were putting in whole weeks more of work per year, too. She detailed 47.1 workweeks in 1987 compared to 43.9 in 1969. Putting the two trends together, gives you the extra month of work.

Schor’s work continues to be the subject of some debate. Rather than using conventional datasets available from government sources, she created her own model, using some government data as inputs and then making various statistical adjustments to the figures.³As she noted at the time, her figures were at odds with the data from the establishment survey of employment, which showed that over the period, weekly hours actually fell and paid time off rose. However, she suggested that the official figures did not take into account the fact that moonlighters were on the rise, nor the fact that the number of weeks worked per year was also increasing. Since her original publication, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington has continued to update her model. Their data show that by 2000, American workers were putting in about 1,878 hours a year, or about five weeks of work more than they did in 1973.⁴

Still another way to check for a leisure shortage is to look at holidays. It is indisputable that North American workers get scandalously little vacation time. According to a survey by Expedia.com, U.S. workers get an average of 14 days off a year, compared to 26 for German workers and a stunning 36 days for the French. Only Canada, where workers get an average of 18 days off, comes close to the meager U.S. vacation allowance. Perhaps the most shocking thing is the number of North American employees who do not get around to using the few days they are allowed off per year. About one-third of employed U.S. adults usually do not take off all of the vacation days they receive each year. As of 2007, 23 percent of Americans admit to checking email or voicemail when they are on vacation, up from just 16 percent in 2005.⁵ Despite the fact that work is a huge factor behind the time crunch, defining leisure as the opposite of working for a paying wage is not particularly accurate. By that definition, leisure could refer to staying home with small children or going to university full time, rather than whiling away the days lying on a chaise longue and sipping a drink with a little umbrella. That’s why the strictest economists’ definition does not really capture why leisure is in such short supply. A better definition of leisure may be the one that comes from the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia:

Leisure time is time not spent on compulsory activities like employment, education, running a business and household chores. The distinction is not strict, since necessity can be larger or smaller, and things may be done for pleasure as well as for longer term usefulness.

Indeed, that definition captures the somewhat murky nature of the demands on our time, and our leisure, as they now exist. Wikipedia also tells us that the word leisure “descends from the Latin word licere , meaning “to be permitted” or “to be free.” The Old French leisir first appeared in the early 14th century and the “u” first appeared in the early 16th century, probably by analogy with words such as pleasure.

Much of the leisure bust of recent years is a result of scheduling compulsory activities into time that once would have been “free.” That’s probably most evident in the case of parents, both stay-at-home and working, who now spend their lives shuttling from one activity to another. “I see them all the time,” says Kelly, the owner of a children’s consignment store in a particularly leafy, upscale suburb. “Stay-at-home mothers who are never home. They feel they have to justify giving up work, so they spend all day in their vans, playing chauffeur to their kids. They come in here with stacks of clothes they have sorted out of their kids’ cupboards, because they are determined to keep their homes ultra-organized. I told one the other day that she had to give herself a break before she had a meltdown.”

Activities seem to have crowded into everyone’s life to the extent that even the smallest children have calendars that are packed to bursting. The 1990s saw what child psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld calls “hyper-parenting” kick into high gear. Rosenfield, in his book The Overscheduled Child, maintains that parents are trying so hard to give their children a taste of everything that both parents and children become overwhelmed.

Where it might once have been acceptable for a stay-at-home mom to confine her toddler to the playpen while enjoying a coffee with a friend, by today’s standards that would practically be considered neglect. Typically, the best that today’s mothers of children under a year old can count on is sitting around in organized “Babies, Music and Creative Play” classes. As their kids get older, the activities multiply far beyond circle time. From soccer to cooking to ballet to art appreciation, classes and activities for children abound, and it is up to parents to get their kids to them. This, of course, is positive in many ways for the children who are learning how to swim or skate or play musical instruments. It does, however, seem to be leading to a surfeit of family stress as parents shuttle their offspring from activity to activity. Whether in or out of the labor force, parents are worn down by the activity cycle. “It’s crazy,” says Julie, a working mom of a five-year-old and a three-year-old. “I finally cut down on the kids activities . . . I told Sophie that if she was taking jazz dancing she couldn’t take ballet. It’s impossible to get them to everything.” Julie’s motives are the same well-meaning ones that affect many parents in her social and income group—mainly highly paid professionals who live in comfortable homes that afford them many luxuries, albeit not enough time. She wants to keep her children physically active, mentally stimulated and happy, and she wants them to experience lots of activities when they are young so they can perhaps pare things down to a few choices later on. Although she agrees that there is “practically a law” that her kids take both swimming and soccer, conforming to the social norm has relatively little to do with it. Her feeling is that to be a good parent involves a certain amount of sacrifice, and what tends to get sacrificed is time.

As good as Julie’s motives may be, they also have a flipside. The negative consequences of overscheduled families are serious enough that they have caught the attention of the National Mental Health Association. On their website, the association posts a list of ways for parents to lighten their load, warning that children in overscheduled families are more prone to stress, depression and lower self-esteem. “Resolve to eat dinner together as a family at least three to five times a week, even if this is sandwiches before you head out to a game or lesson,” they warn. Of course, from a business perspective, the rush means an opportunity to serve families who may not get around to having that dinner at home.

Whoever you ask, there is widespread agreement that the time crunch is an issue in our society. Leisure time, that is, time that can be used in any way you wish, is in short supply. In this category are big blocks of free time—basically days and weeks when no labor force work is scheduled and vacations can be planned (although childcare and other chores still have to be done on these days off, of course). Daily and weekly hours of “free” time are even scarcer. Interestingly enough, although there is a virtually universal agreement that there is not enough time, the numbers simply do not tell the same story.

BY THE NUMBERS: A GLUT OF LEISURE TIME

Although anecdotally the time crunch can be heard loud and clear, the numbers actually tell a different and somewhat puzzling story. According to the data, North Americans actually have a large amount of leisure time, and indeed, that time has been growing at a nice clip over the past couple of decades.

The most comprehensive data on leisure time comes from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a project of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics administered through the University of Maryland. Since 1965, a representative sample of households have been asked to keep “time diaries” recording their activities. Participants are asked to track exactly what they did over a given day in 15-minute increments—working, commuting, shopping, preparing dinner and participating in leisure activities. For purposes of the use-of-time project, leisure activities are defined as being comprised of socializing and communicating, watching television, participating in sports, exercise and recreation. As in life, leisure, for the purpose of the survey, is the residual category, the time left over after all the necessities have been taken care of.

Contrary to the common refrain, these time diaries show that American leisure time is fairly plentiful. The 2005 data shows that the average person over the age of 15 had five hours and eight minutes of leisure time on any given day. Men, with five hours and 30 minutes had a bit more than women, who had about four hours and 48 minutes of free time. Although there are, of course, some who have too much time on their hands—the unemployed come to mind—very few people seem to have five hours each day to do with as they wish. Still, the Canadian data show much the same puzzling pattern. The last time the data were compiled, in 2005, the results showed that free time averaged five hours and 30 minutes a day, with men getting five hours and 48 minutes “off” and women getting about five hours and 12 minutes.

Compared to the data on working hours, and compared to what seems like everyone’s experience, the numbers feel wrong. “How much leisure time does the government say I have? Four or five hours? To sit and do nothing?” That’s the reaction of Lisa, a sales manager at a high-tech company as well as the mom of two children, both under two years old. She describes her day.

“I get up when the kids get up—between 6:45 and 7:15 a.m. Then my husband and I care for them. We have a nanny, but she gets here about 8:30. I work at home, so as soon as the kids are settled, I head downstairs to my basement office, and then I’m busy all day. Sometimes I go out to see clients; other times we do “webinars.” There are days I don’t even get upstairs to grab lunch. At 5:00 I call it quits. The kids nap in the afternoon, but they get up around 5:00 and we play a bit. Then I have to cook dinner, and my husband comes home and we eat and clean up. Then baths and all that, and the baby goes down to sleep at 8:00 p.m. My 22-month-old goes to bed closer to 9:30. ‘Leisure’ is whatever is left over, and I don’t have much left after that.”

Few would likely agree that we have more ...