Time Compression
Updated: 22-Jul-07 – In 1946, an engineer at defense contractor Raytheon, Percy Spencer, noticed something peculiar. While testing a new vacuum tube called a magnetron, a candy bar had melted in his pocket. Intrigued, Spencer placed some popcorn near the tube and watched in awe as kernels began popping all over his lab counter. Raytheon engineers quickly refined Spencer’s discovery and in late 1946 filed for a patent covering the use of microwaves to cook food.
Not far away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, little Jennifer, Edwin Land’s three-year- old daughter, prodded her father to develop pictures faster. And so, the Polaroid camera was born. Both devices introduced consumers to the idea of instant gratification, ushering in a whole new lifestyle concept: the compression of time.
More than 50 years later, the acceleration of life continues. Today, we can’t find the time to devote to hunting or fishing. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that the number of anglers has dropped 12% since 2001. During the same five-year period, the number of hunters has fallen by 4%.
Paris’ “Trottoir roulant rapide”(high-speed sidewalk) now zips Metro travelers around at 8 km/hr, 1km less than the above picture suggests, a speed that still requires a three-meter transition area at each end, which one recent visitor described as “a relatively unnatural acceleration and deceleration.”
Some couples now get together for “dinner and PowerPoint,” combining pleasure with work in order to save time, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The average Wal-Mart shopper spends 21 minutes in the store but finds only seven of the 10 items on his or her shopping list, so the chain is trying to improve store navigation in order to help harried consumers find things faster.
The Ubertrend of Time Compression, responsible for the speed of life, is perhaps one of the most pervasive trends affecting society today. Time Compression has far-reaching consequences on a host of markets, ranging from coffee and energy drinks to yoga and spas to work and leisure.
You’ve have already doctored cocktails with energy drinks. How about adding a bigger kick to your morning cup of joe? 7-Eleven’s new Energy Coffee contains herbal extracts, including guarana, ginseng and yerba maté. Woohoo!
A survey by employment firm Hudson found that more than half of U.S. workers fail to take all their vacation days, with 30% saying they use less than half their allotted time, and 20% taking only a few days instead of a week or two. That’s up from the 36% who said that they did not plan to take a full vacation in 2005, according to the “Overwork in America” study by the Families and Work Institute.
Americans now take even less vacation than the Japanese, the very people who gave rise to karoshi — the phenomenon of being worked to death.
Symbolic of the times, Starbucks plans to open 40,000 outlets worldwide, which would help it surpass McDonald’s as the world’s largest food chain. Ironically, McDonald’s fast-food concept was the standard bearer for Time Compression in the last century. It has now been supplanted by coffee, this century’s most popular method of speeding life up.
