Why the lunch break is going extinct

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

My relatives in Athens, Greece have always indulged when it came to their lunch breaks.

They’d leave work and head home around 1 p.m. and sit down with family at a big table loaded with food, everything from grilled octopus with greens to roasted lemon chicken and potatoes. There was also always wine and Ouzo, an anise-flavored liquor, flowing.

As you can imagine, everyone got pretty tired partaking in this feast so they’d all go off to bed for at least an hour nap.

Around 3:30 or 4 p.m. they’d go back to the office or factory and toil until about 7 or 8 p.m.

I always mocked my relatives when we would visit them in Greece during my teen years. Their endless lunch breaks seemed to me to be the height of laziness.

Ah, the ignorance of youth. I would give my right arm if I could get that kind of lunch today. Who wouldn’t?

Not only is this not an option for most of the U.S. workforce, we’re lucky if we get a lunch break at all.

The workers at VendorSeek.com don’t get any lunch breaks Monday through Thursday.

“It is encouraged that we eat at our desks and use this ‘down time’ to address e-mails, inter-office meetings, and other tasks and necessities that would interrupt the flow of the normal course of the work day,” says Ken Wisnefski, president of the company that helps businesses find outsourcing services. He points out that the company is a bit more lax on Fridays and workers can take up to an hour to do what they wish.

What Wisnefski found was his workers were spending so much time scheduling lunches and then ramping back up again after lunches that they ended up playing catch up for most of the day.

“Now things are more organized, less chaotic,” he explains.

Lunch hours, forget them. Those were long gone years ago. A study by chicken fast food chain KFC Corp., found that 60 percent of workers in Corporate America actually considered the lunch hour “the biggest myth of office life.”

But now a growing number of employees are finding they are also losing their right to a lunch half hour, or any break at all. About 55 percent of workers take a half hour or less for their lunch breaks, according to a survey by Steelcase, an office equipment maker.

Women, who are forever trying to prove themselves in the work world, are not surprisingly more likely to take shorter lunch breaks than men; and all you uptight Northeasterners are also taking shorter lunches than your counterparts in the rest of the nation.

Many workplace experts suspect even those workers who are allotted a half hour for lunch, often end up never leaving their desks.

The move to shorter or non-existent lunches is in some cases self-imposed. “It’s almost as though workers started the trend,” says Deborah Brown-Volkman, a career coach.

We’re all too busy these days to take a leisurely lunch and we also want to get out of work at a reasonable hour so we can have some quality time with our families and friends. If you work through lunch, the thought goes, you can get out of the office before the witching hour.

In the case of VendorSeek, employees actually hatched the idea to do a way with lunches, maintains Wisnefski. “They asked, ‘why do we need to take lunch?’”

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