Daylight Saving Time Ended Today Instead of Last Week. Thank the Candy Lobby.
Under the old rules, you would have turned your clocks back on October 25, and kids would have gone trick or treating in the dark. Instead it happened this morning. The November time change is called the end of Daylight Saving Time, which transitions the U.S. back to Standard Time, and the reason it now comes after Halloween has more to do with candy sales than sunlight.
The week that moved
Until 2006, Americans fell back on the last Sunday in October. Then Congress passed the 2005 energy bill, and starting in 2007, Daylight Saving Time began three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and ended one week later than it used to.
That one extra week in the fall was enough to put Halloween night inside daylight saving time, so trick or treating gets one more hour of evening light. Candy makers had been chasing that for a long time. According to Michael Downing, who wrote a book on the history of daylight saving time, candy makers spent 25 years trying to get trick or treat covered, figuring kids would collect more candy with an extra hour of daylight, and at the 1985 hearings they even put candy pumpkins on every senator’s seat. They lost that round. Twenty years later, they got the calendar they wanted.
A $13.5 billion night
Here is why that hour is worth fighting over. Consumer spending on Halloween is expected to reach $13.5 billion this year, according to the National Retail Federation. Candy is the most popular purchase, with 96% of consumers planning to buy sweets, accounting for $4.1 billion in spending.
Nobody can say exactly how much of that comes from the extra hour of light. There’s no clean experiment for Halloween. What we do know is that daylight changes how people shop.
Phoenix shows what darkness costs
Phoenix happens to be the best natural experiment we have, because Arizona never changes its clocks. In 2016, the JPMorgan Chase Institute compared card spending in Los Angeles with Phoenix using over 380 million transactions made by over 2.5 million anonymized customers.
When daylight saving time started, daily card spending per person in Los Angeles rose 0.9 percent. When it ended, spending fell 3.5 percent. Grocery stores were hit hardest. People who get off work after sunset just make fewer stops on the way home.
Seen that way, the candy industry was making a sensible bet. When it gets dark earlier, people go out less, and when they go out less, they buy less.
Who gets to own the daylight
There are only so many hours of sunlight, and moving the clock just decides who gets them. Golf courses and grill makers want them in the evening. Sleep doctors and parents of kids who catch the school bus in the dark want them in the morning. Congress is still arguing about it. The House voted this summer to make daylight saving time permanent, and the Senate hasn’t acted.
So the clock on your wall isn’t really set by the sun. Lobbying moved it, one week at a time, and the candy aisle is part of the reason.
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