Folks are sprucing up RVs, parents are packing kids’ camp gear, airlines are adding flights, and hotels are raising prices. The summer vacationers are coming.
Yosemite Falls 1902 – LC-USZ62-9731
What seems like a flood to us, however, is a trickle compared to the tsunami of holidaymakers in Europe, as anyone who has been sardined into a European train, plane, or lane at the beginning of July and August knows. On a recent summer day in Dubrovnik, I’ve been told, five cruise ships’ worth of tour groups created such a pedestrian gridlock that police had to unknot the crowd.
Americans just don’t vacation like other people do.
Why? — See the rest of this column at the Boston Review: The Leisure Gap.
Update (Sept. 1, 2014): An analysis on Vox claims that there has been a tremendous drop in the percent of American workers who take week-long vacations, from about 80% around 1980 to about 55% in 2014. Update (Sept. 12, 2014): An analysis by Daniel S. Hamermesh and Elena Stancanelli reveals that, other things being equal, including total hours worked, Americans are likelier than people in several other OECD nations to work “strange” hours — i.e., nights or weekends. This appears to testify to the relative weakness of employees in the American labor market.
MADE IN AMERICA 