Super Bowl and Such
Monday, February 4th, 2008The Giants won the Super Bowl last night by upsetting the previously undefeated Patriots!
Reportedly 1.5 million people were expected to call in sick today. If the average income of these people was $20.oo per hour, the cost of this practice would cost $30,000,000 per hour or $240,000,000 for the day in lost productivity!
Now everyone knows we don’t work eight hours a day. But practically speaking if the same math were used with my experience factor of .67%, then we still lost about $160,000,000 in productivity. The general population will have to bear the burden of this expense by paying a higher price for consumer goods and services.
Many companies do not pay for single day sick leave usage without a doctor’s note. After all it really is a medical benefit, not a right of extra time off from work.
The average 30 second commercial ad cost for the Super Bowl was $2,700,000. “Not a lot of money” is what I have heard regarding the expense as a percentage of “advertising budget” for the companies that did advertise. But, then again, we the consumer pay for those costs too.
So on this day, 2-4-2008, I am a little in awe that we don’t seem to have a big problem with some spiralling costs. I’ll bet a lot of people do not know that the company that has recently become the largest profit taker of any company in U.S. history for a quarterly and annual profit ( $11.7 billion, $40.6 billion respectively) is Exxon Mobil. Exxon Mobil produces about 3 percent of the world’s oil and had sales of $404.5 billion for 2007!
I think that I have written enough this morning after Super Bowl. I am going back to bed and dream of sawbucks or gold dust or the next Super Something.