Holiday. Celebrate!

Lithuanian politicians are interesting folk. Their decisions are sometimes beyond common sense. For example, as regards public holidays and turning them into extended weekends.

It's been a law for a while that when a public holiday falls on a weekend, an additional day off is given as compensation for the "lost" day off. It sounds like an attractive (populistic?) law and most people should be pleased with it. However, purely from the business perspective such additional days off mean lost business income and consequently lost tax revenues for the state. Business losses due to such idle days are estimated at millions of litas.

Don't get me wrong - I do like holidays but sometimes such prolonged weekends are a nightmare for a marketer. If you consider launching a marketing campaign, calendar weeks that consist of only three working days are lost weeks. Unless you trade in Easter bunnies, then this March is an out-of-business month. It's been calculated that this present month of March has as many as 13 days off in Lithuania. Almost half the month! It's impossible to squeeze in a marketing campaign and run it effectively.

By the way, some public holidays always fall on the weekend because they are a weekend-type holiday by nature (e.g. Mother's Day, which is the first Sunday of May). In Lithuania, this is also compensated by an additional day off on Monday. I heard that this particular compensation may be called off.

Today (Tuesday) is a public holiday, the Day of Restoration of Lithuania's independence, and we've had a four-day long weekend (Monday as a working day has been moved to the coming Saturday). Go and celebrate! Because the state tells so.