Kicker: One expensive time change

NICK EICHER, HOST: I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, time is money.

Well, at Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing … you know it as 3-M … time quite literally is money.

Daylight saving time … going through the semi-annual motions of springing forward and falling back … was a pretty expensive prospect. 3M’s a huge company, with a 400-acre campus, and lots and lots of wall clocks.

So somebody there figured out just how much it cost the company to pull down the clocks, adjust them, change batteries, and put them back up. Tom Berg is a plant engineering supervisor who talked with Minnesota Public Radio.

BERG: We looked at the last five years, and on average it’s about $35,000.

You heard that right—$35 grand just to change the clocks! So 3M decided just to forget it. Almost all of the wall clocks did not fall back this time, they fell off and they’re going back up.

It’s not as though employees won’t know what time it is.

BERG: We have time everywhere—between our cellphones, printers, vending machines, desk clocks—we have clocks everywhere.

Yes, and they change automatically.

So I think we have the answer to the question the pop band Chicago asked back in 1969 … does anybody really know what time it is … 

There’s a better question now … 

Does anybody not know?

It’s The World and Everything in It.

Creative Commons/Scott Wilson

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