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Attack of the Clones to Cost Economy $300m

Posted by timothy on from the but-think-of-the-toy-revenues dept.

Audent writes: "Attack of the Clones may make you sick but according to this story, it will cost the US economy $300 million in lost productivity what with all the nerds calling in with a bad case of midiclorianitis. ... Nerds and geeks and propellorheads are singled out as being most at risk. Take your medication now! dammit." A nameless reader also points to a review (looks like two, but only one is up at the time of this writing) up at http://www.pstwo.net/.

5 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. Bovine Excrement! by toupsie · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Star Wars-related absenteeism could cost the US economy more than $300m in wages when Episode II is released on May 16, according to employment experts.

    Osama Bin Laden could only wish. There are lies, damn lies, and marketing generated statistics. If there was such a thing as an "employment expert", I think they would have, by now, figured out the whole unemployment problem and solved it. Three hundred million bucks in lost productivity? The 9/11 atrocity is estimated at 1.2 billion dollars in economic damage to US worker productivity, not counting lost jobs, from what I have read. To say that Star Wars is going to do 1/4 of the economic damage as September 11th might send Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge's color coded domestic terrorism scale to RED causing him to ban all showings before 6pm local time.

    Write this one off to cheap and easy journalism recycling a press release. If this is true, however, I expect to see George Lucas at Gitmo in the next month.

    --
    Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
    1. Re:Bovine Excrement! by Combuchan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      $1.2 billion? Do you have any idea how much of an insignificant figure this is, especially when the US government is involved?

      According to this google result, airline losses could top $10 billion, actual physical tamage is estimated at $25 billion, Bush is still talking about a $75 billion economic stimulus plan (tho support for this is fading fast), the arilines got a $15 billion bailout package, and that doesn't even begin to cover the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt that was cast upon this nation the instant the planes hit the towers, which I've read at I think $50 billion for maybe NYC alone. Results aren't clear of this, and it's all speculation and estimating regardless. But the Consumer Confidence Index, a widely respected barometer of how willing consumers are to actually spend money, plummet to its lowest level in seven years.

      Your comparison of bin Laden to Star Wars is offbase, and I'm a bit offended by your gross underestimates. :P

      If you disagree, reply.

      --
      "[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
  2. Re:Lost productivity by ender81b · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, from cmdr taco's own comment we can figure slashdot get 1 million unique visitors a day. Ok then. Say, 50 % are actually at work and at the correct time, 500,000 unique visitors. Assume they only visit slashdot ONCE during their daily job for 15 minutes. You get 500,000 x 15 = 7,500,000 minutes of lost productivity per day.

    Hmm, figure average wage of U.S. worker to be 35,000$/year (roughly) that is, 20$/hour. OK then, so 7,500,000 minutes = 125,000 hours x 20$/hour = 2.5 million dollars/per day.

    Extrapolating for a work year (roughly 270 work days in a year) = 675 million dollars in a year due to slashdot and lost productivity.

    Hmmm. I'm probably wrong, for one thing not everybody spends 15 minutes a day on slashdot, not everyone looks every day, not everybody does it works, not everybody makes 20$/hour so that number is prolly too high.

    But even if you figure it is DOUBLE or TRIPLE what the real number is.. wow.. even if it is QUADRUPLE that means that the real number would be 168,750,000 million. Not quite Star Wars but close..

  3. Isn't this irrelevant? by jester45 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't know a whole lot about how this works yet, but it seems to me that in awarding sick days, companies would have already planned for this. Don't they expect people might take days off? This just happens to be everybody leaving on the same day.

    I understand that other factors might be involved, such as not having enough employees available to run a piece of equipment, but that's not what they're talking about. Raw wage calculations should have been taken care of already.

    Yes?

  4. Dragon Quest by Vegan+Pagan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In Japan, they require by law that events this popular (Dragon Quest games) get moved to Sunday. Should we do the same?