Retailers Engineered Daylight Saving, Not Energy Planners

Every March, millions of people lose an hour of sleep on the same night. Nearly everyone blames Benjamin Franklin — who didn't start it.

In 1784, Franklin published a satirical letter suggesting Parisians wake earlier to save candles, written as a joke in a publication that barely circulated. The myth persists because it feels right, because it answers a question we've already decided about ourselves.

Daylight saving time began in 1918 when Germany and Austria first adopted it, followed by Britain and America — wartime rationing dressed in clock-adjusting clothes. The government needed to conserve coal for the war effort, betting that one hour moved from morning to evening would theoretically reduce demand for artificial light.

It lasted seven months and was so unpopular. Farmers hated it, workers despised the sleep disruption. That Congress repealed it that October. Then came 1966 and the Uniform Time Act. The push came not from energy planners but from retailers and petroleum companies. The oil industry saw more evening daylight as a pathway to more driving. Shopping centers, still new and desperate for traffic, wanted people moving through their parking lots during daylight hours. The energy-savings claim was recycled from 1918, but the real goal was commerce extended by sunlight.

Fifty years of research proves DST does not save energy. Studies from Indiana, where counties switched the policy on and off, show electricity use actually increased during daylight saving time. A 2008 meta-analysis confirmed the energy claim was simply wrong. Yet DST endures because the beneficiaries remain constant. Retailers and oil companies still profit from evening activity. The costs are diffuse and individual, including disrupted sleep patterns, spikes in heart attacks the week after the shift. Increased traffic deaths. Yet nobody sees these as a policy problem. They blame their own bodies instead.

This is how a policy survives falsification. Disband the beneficiary and the myth collapses. But when the profit center stays intact, the narrative doesn't need to be true. It only needs to be repeated by enough people with enough invested interest. Watch any industry fighting regulation, and you'll see the same structure. The false claim is lodged inside a true one, the beneficiary is invisible. The cost is borne by people who think the problem is themselves.