Solar Eclipse

The Solar Eclipse Cost the U.S. Economy a Huge Amount of Money

The hit to employee productivity was worse than March Madness but not as bad as James Comey.
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By Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

Did you enjoy your two-and-a-half-minute solar eclipse viewing on Monday? Good, because stepping away from your desk to peek at the sun through a pair of eclipse glasses could possibly have cost the U.S. workforce in diminished productivity. Or at least that’s according to outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which used information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to predict a loss in worker productivity. Here’s how the math breaks down: there are about 87 million U.S. workers, making an average hourly wage of $23.86. If they all took about 20 minutes to scout out a spot to see the eclipse and then watch the whole thing unfold, it would cost an employer $7.95 per person, or, when multiplied by 87 million, about $694 million in lost productivity.

Your back-of-the-envelope mileage may vary. Challenger, Gray & Christmas got that number by assuming employees are already being productive every moment that they’re at their desks in the early afternoon—and not, for instance, browsing Facebook—and that diversions like watching the eclipse are the only unproductive moments of an employee’s day. As anyone who has ever worked can attest (and as Wired Editor-in-Chief Nick Thompson points out using Facebook usage numbers), that simply isn’t true.

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Americans skipping out on work to go watch the eclipse may have resulted in productivity losses for their bosses, but don’t feel too bad about it. Seven hundred million sounds like a lot, but by its own accounting, the firm says the U.S. economy collectively lost $615 million from people setting their brackets during March Madness opening week; $1.7 billion per hour from people discussing the Super Bowl the following day; $1.9 billion per hour during Cyber Monday; $3.3 billion during James Comey’s testimony earlier this summer; and $10 billion during Amazon Prime Day.