the end of leisure? - Teleshopping at work - Statistical Data Included - Brief Article

American Demographics, July, 2000 by Alison Stein Wellner

The benefit to marketers is clear: a captive audience. Concierge services have exclusive access to a defined group of upscale consumers. Sherbrooke says Circles' average member is a professional, 35 to 55 years old, with an income of at least $75,000. What's more, marketers who offer their services via concierge networks can engage in some unobtrusive marketing wrapped in along with the service. Customers who use Baltimore, Maryland-based RewardsPlus, for example, are learning about specific brands as they use the Web to garner additional "perks" of employment, like discounts on movie tickets and restaurants.

RewardsPlus' Web site (www.rewardsplus.com) also provides the mechanism for employees to pay for big-ticket items, such as car insurance, through payroll deduction. "It's the crossroads between Internet marketing and affinity marketing," explains Steve J. Fecko, the company's senior vice president of marketing. This channel is especially attractive for companies marketing big-ticket, infrequent purchases, like cars or a house, Fecko says. Why? Because they keep that brand in front of consumers every day on the work home page that they log onto several times a day."

how did we get here? Employers helping workers plan their parties? Employees becoming hostage to increasingly convenient technology? The blurring of work and home life is actually a very old solution to the problem of all-encompassing work, points out SpectraCom's Jorian Clarke, who is also a sociologist. Decades ago, when the primary business of the United States was agriculture, there was little distinction between work time and leisure time. "When people worked and lived on the farm, families were able to juggle both their family needs and their work needs," says Clarke.

The industrial revolution, with its assembly-lines and shift workers, brought an end to that state. Today, however, many of us have moved into jobs that do not require us to cram the workday between sunrise and sunset. In fact, in the global economy, there's good reason to be open 24 hours a day because even in the dead of night, somewhere on earth, a customer needs attention. Call it Blur: The Sequel.

The information revolution may have made this possible, but it's the advent of wireless communication that put it in hyperdrive. Half of all Americans own a cell phone, and two-thirds of users talk on them at least several times a week, according to a recent Gallup poll. Moreover, 46 percent of pleasure travelers hang onto their cell phones when they're away, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. It's not just voice mail, either: 18 percent clutch their pagers, 6 percent haul their laptops, and 10 percent check e-mail on vacation.

And it goes both ways - we take work on vacation, and family to work. For example, more of us are trying to wring some quality time out of corporate junkets: In 1999, 23 million business trips included a child, compared with 7.4 million trips in 1987, an increase of more than 200 percent. That might be because we aren't traveling purely for leisure as often as we used to. The Travel Industry Association found that 37 percent of all adults claim they are less able to take a vacation this year because of demands on their time. Last winter, the group found that the average number of days consumers planned to spend on their longest vacation dropped to a five-year low of 7.6 days.