Spring Forward! It sounds so positive, doesn’t it? Way better than ‘Lose an Hour of Sleep and Wake Up in the Dark for Another Two Weeks’, which is what it looks like to me – any may be why I don’t have a career in marketing. One advantage of traveling around introducing my product is the time I now get to waste in airports. There’s only so much time you can spend in the Brookstone checking out the great products you never knew you needed and I know way more about the lives of celebrities than I’m comfortable admitting. But I do spend time on my laptop finding out about things I’ve always wondered about. Which brings me to Daylight Saving Time. I swear I was told that we had it so children could leave school and help bring in the crops. It made sense to me so I never questioned it, but on a recent trip I looked it up and it turns out the concept was started in Germany during WWII in order to save fuel and was slowly adopted in the US. Guess the marketing folks didn’t like that one and came up with the children rushing home to gather in the harvest concept.
On a practical note, I don’t really understand how fuel savings works these days with heat pumps and AC and there’s definitely a cost to having the citizens of 48 States of the Union wandering dazedly into their days every Spring. Have you ever showed up one hour late or early because the one clock in the house you looked at didn’t re-set? Hawaii and Arizona don’t change the time – doesn’t seem right – warm winters and no Daylight Saving Time.Despite the fact that my internal clock is re-setting pretty slowly, I am very excited to think that Spring is just around the corner. We’ve been working hard to get our spirits into new markets and have continued to be amazed at how well we’re received. It does help me Spring Forward with some enthusiasm when I spend time with people who are warm, welcoming and having a great time, regardless of the weather or the position of the clock hands.
Happy Spring.