There seems to me to be a great fallacy in the assumption that "Cyber Monday" or other time spent for on-line shopping is causing great disruption to business and productivity. One actually avoids absenteeism that otherwise would be much more prevalent if on-line shopping were not an available option during lunch breaks or other small chunks of time.

And I cannot resist pointing out the irony that these findings of lost productivity were reported by the firm of Challenger, Grey, and Christmas. Could it be that we will be challenged with a grey Christmas if moderate amounts of on-line shopping were curtailed?

As with most enterprise systems use "crises", the solution to this one is simple. Effective management and engagement with your staff will eliminate any potential damage from too much time spent shopping on line. It would be interesting to evaluate the corrolary to this phoenomena. How many more hours are employees willing to work because they have the opportunity to do things like buying that one rare toy for their 9 year old while sitting in their cubicle at work, instead of using a "sick" or "personal" day to run over to Toys R Us and wait in line for 5 hours? We have now turned the corner back in to the realm of trying to manage every minute of every employee. That way lies the death of creativity, and borderline insanity for many middle managers. We need to trust our tools and reasonable oversite to catch those who are egregious office layabouts and remove them. That will allow us to treat our coworkers like adults and not try to put them in a cage that will stifle their most important contribution, creativity.

I don't like this article, I believe this type of thinking leads to dehumanization in the long run.

Consider, do you expect us to believe that people putting $488 million back into the economy(an unproven sum by the way) is going to COST employers that much just because they will likely be shopping?

Why not just multiply every holiday by some fudged number, throw in some embellishment of adding up the smoke breaks, lunches and water cooler chat, internet surfing, meetings about meetings, time on the phone, time getting to and from work, and eventually reach the reasonable conclusion that COMPANIES CAN'T AFFORD TO EMPLOY HUMANS after all.

I can't wait to see the invented numbers coming after the holidays, when we'll hear cries from retailers that not enough people bought useless gift items, which we'll be expected to accept as proof there MUST be something wrong with our economies as well.

If you manage your employees by what they do, not what or how much time they spend doing it, who cares if they shop on line?

If employees have to juggle their schedules by shopping on line at work, then take a project home to finish it on time, who loses? Nobody, that's who.

I think this research firm needs to account for the hours spent by employees working after 5 PM or on weekends and subtract that from the $488M.

Whether or not shopping is occurring on Monday or any other day is its own question.

However the assumption that time spent in ordering at work can be equated to dollars lost is a fundamentally flawed concept.

We can assign a number to how much a company is spending for payroll. This is basically a constant. So the only loss is if there is a reduction in income due to the non-productive activity. So the underlying assertion is that revenues will drop if everybody is not 100% productive. This is categorically false.

This is the basis of cost based acounting which has been repeatedly proven as a bogus concept. The lack of fundamental understanding of how work relates to income is the root of a lot of very poor business decisions.

So I invite Deb Perelman to study Lean and Theory of Constraints to see how far off the mark this "crisis" truly is.