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Of golf’s many storied traditions, this one has long held true: Weekdays were a time of rest, recovery and senior discounts, the sole province of retirees whose biggest concern is a chip that stops far short of the hole.
But a new Stanford University analysis shows that the work-from-home trend is scrambling the game’s weekly rhythms and routines, with busy professionals squeezing in rounds on once-sleepy Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays — further proof that the industrial-era 9-to-5 routine is vanishing.
“We’re busy almost every day,” said Kevin Sprenger, general manager of Baylands Golf Links in Palo Alto, where staffers were cleaning balls and emptying trash on a recent Tuesday morning, with 147 rounds reserved for play. “Thursday’s as busy as Sunday.”
Using geolocation data from cars and phones of people visiting the nation’s 3,400 golf courses, the Stanford study found that Wednesdays were 143% busier in August 2022 than in the pre-pandemic days of August 2019. The trend is particularly pronounced on afternoons, it found, with 278% more people playing at 4 p.m. on Wednesdays than before the pandemic.
On California courses, visits have nearly doubled on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, the team found.
The weekday trend is also true for gyms, shopping malls, tennis courts and hair salons, according to the researchers Nick Bloom and Alex Finan.
“The explosion of working from home has created a boom in weekday leisure. Home-based employees can pop out for an hour or two during the day,” said Bloom, professor of economics. “The pandemic has relaxed the bottleneck of the weekend for many leisure activities.”
Throughout most of human history, work and home were the same place, said Fred Turner, professor of communication at Stanford University, where he studies the impact of new media technologies on American culture since World War II.
But for the past 300 years, we’ve lived in a world where work was concentrated in factories and offices, and we were forced to commute, said Turner. As a result, life was divided into “home time” and “work time.”
“What’s happening now is a reconfiguring of how we work. That’s been going on for a while, but the pandemic provided an accelerant,” he said. “We are, in some ways, returning to that older way of living.
