King Kaufman's Sports Daily
The Super Bowl of bad math: Hundreds of millions in lost productivity! Huge economic boost for the host city!
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Jan. 30, 2007 | Forget Bears-Colts. This is the week of the Super Bowl of Credulity.
We just need a better name for it. How about the Super Bowl of outlandish claims? Of facts and figures for people who are bad at math. Special bonus: Free lottery tickets for all participants! Only $1 each!
If it takes you five minutes to read this column, you've cost corporate America $81 million. That's the estimate this year from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the Chicago outplacement firm that's very good at three things:
1) Making inane, outrageously inflated estimates of productivity lost by American businesses in advance of major sporting events.
2) Getting its name in the papers.
3) Getting spanked like a monkey for it by this column.
This column needs to get better at getting its name in the papers, apparently, because once again the national media is pretty much swallowing hook, line and stinker Challenger Gray's latest estimate, which is that Super Bowl 41 is costing American business -- ready for it? Think of a crazy number. Double it.
Wrong! Too low. It's $810 million. That's $162 million a day.
And that's nationwide. You should see the estimates for Chicago and Indianapolis. I won't show them to you. You'd go blind. Suffice to say, if Challenger Gray is right, Chicago can't possibly survive the catastrophe. If there's such a thing as Chicago, Ill., a week from today, it'll be a damn miracle.
What Challenger Gray does is estimate that employees spend 10 company minutes a day on the big game during Super Bowl; then it figures that 57 million of the 90 million viewers are workers, multiplies by an average hourly wage of around $17 to get 28.4 cents per minute and, abracadabra, 10 times .284 times 57 million times five equals: $810 million.
Actually it equals $809.4 million, but what's $600,000 worth of baloney between gullible friends?
You're spending half of your daily allotment of Super Bowl wasted time on this column, so that's $405 million for the week, $81 million just today. I hope you're happy.
