I keep seeing the claim that Federal Express brought 800 jobs to Indiana because Indiana implemented Daylight Saving Time. Anybody have actual facts that prove or disprove this claim? A quick Google search just shows me that State government officials have made the claim and then Republican candidates repeating the claim. I see at least one candidate has made the claim that FedEx added the jobs to Indiana solely because of DST. Some have also tried to tie the Honda plant to DST, on what basis, I don’t know.
My suspicion is that pro-DST candidates will try generally to characterize any new job in Indiana as being related to the adoption of DST. But the FedEx jobs will be the talking point we hear from now until Doomsday.
Fine, let them have their DST victory. Let me know when someone credits EASTERN time with jobs rather than Central.
I would so much rather have CDT instead of EDT, and I think it would add even MORE jobs since people would be able to look at a globe and guess the time properly.
I can’t imagine that FedEx and Honda, both of which do business all over the world, base decisions on where to locate on DST or non-DST status.
Testing comments — a user has reported some problems posting.
I doubt that DST opened the flood gates of new jobs. It seems that Arizona is doing fine and they don’t observe DST.
I was against observing DST, but now that we have it it, we should keep it. But I too want to observe Central not Eastern. Before we observed DST, we spent more time each year in sync with Chicago than we did with New York.
I’ve heard Fed Ex would prefer to be on Central Time, which would put them in sync with their hub.
FedEx’s headquarters is located in Memphis which does observe Central Daylight Time but I think Indianapolis not observing EDT would be a very minor consideration. The Indianapolis Airport has recently undergone a major expansion that has received very little attention even in Indianapolis. Some of the justification for this very expensive project which included physically moving a portion of I-70 about a ¼ mile south was to allow the FedEx terminal to expand. This project was completed before we started EDT so the FedEx job increases most likely didn’t depend on DST.
John Ketzenberger has a column in the business section of Tuesday’s Star. Kirk Lovell, the air services director for Indianapolis International Airport, has made several trips to China trying to persuade the Chinese that shipping their goods directly to the “Crossroads of America†would give them many advantages
DST is no guarantee of prosperity. Look at Ohio and the loss of manufacturing jobs there. (No offense to any Buckeyes here.) Unless the CEO of a company says, “We came to Indiana because all of the state now observes DST,” I wouldn’t believe those political ads.