Waiting for the cable guy cost U.S. almost $40 billion last year

Waiting for the cable guy isn’t just frustrating, it is also extremely expensive: A new survey has found that waiting longer than usual for in-home services like cable repair and Internet installation is costing Americans $37.7 billion per year. …

Zogby tallied the $37.7 billion per-year figure by interviewing over 1,000 Americans at random about their experiences waiting for in-home service over the past year, finding that 58 percent of respondents had waited for service at their homes in 2011, and that “the annual cost of waiting per individual is equivalent to removing the average American from the workforce for more than two days.”

There isn’t a full mathematical breakdown of how Zogby calculated that near-$40 billion tally, but the report does say that each American values their time lost waiting for cable guys, repairmen and Internet installers, at around $240 per year; presumably Zogby extrapolated outwards to the entire U.S. workforce and came up with $37.7 billion a year in lost funds.