Ben and Jerry reduce productivity in local businesses

Yesterday, as you may or may not know, Ben and Jerry's (should it be Ben's and Jerry's? or is it "Ben and Jerry"'s?) was giving away free ice cream. By free, I mean that it didn't cost any money, but you did have to line up (which at some points during the day looked like it was a couple hundred people long). A group of about 12 people from my workplace decided to go for some of this "free" ice cream (I followed along out of curiousity, of course, and because I was waiting for a long running script to complete). On the way there, I found myself wondering how much this expedition was going to cost our employer in lost wages.

Using the rough (and perhaps conservative) assumptions that the average salary of the group was about $0.50/minute (about 60K) and guessing that this would take about 40 minutes round trip, I figured it would cost about 12 * 40 * 0.50 = $240. In the end, we got there and decided the line was just too long, so we pretty much just walked back to the office. The round trip took at least 10 minutes, so it still ended up costing the company $60 (with which they could have just bought us a bunch of ice cream to consume in the office.

I know this is fraught with troublesome assumptions such as: some of the people may have stayed later than they normally would to make up the lost time (I don't think that would be the case here), or people will be more productive if they have a break like this (probably true with the 10 minute break, maybe not worth it with a 40 minute break), or even that it wouldn't have taken 40 minutes... maybe not... but probably close.

I'm sure that many of the businesses in the area fell victim to this cut in productivity, all due to Ben and Jerry.

By the way, I made it back before my script had finished running!

-KDH