Have you ever stopped in the middle of something completely normal and thought... wait, why do we do that?
Why is the workday eight hours? Why do we change the clocks twice a year? Why is a marathon exactly 26.2 miles? Why do hotels want you out by 11? Why do we tip? And who decided everyone needed a lawn?
Wait... Why Do We Do That? explores the strange, surprising and sometimes ridiculous stories behind the everyday things we rarely stop to question.
Each episode takes one ordinary part of modern life and follows the story of how it got here, who decided it, why it stuck and whether the original reason still makes any sense today.
It's history, psychology, business, culture and a healthy dose of curiosity, without the lecture.
Because apparently, there's a reason for almost everything.
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Why do we have weekends? And who decided that two days off after five days of work was the right deal?
In this episode of Wait... Why Do We Do That?, we uncover the surprisingly complicated story behind Saturday and Sunday.
For much of history, the weekend as we know it simply didn't exist. Workers routinely worked six days a week, Sunday was primarily a religious day of rest, and Saturday was just another working day.
So how did we end up with two?
The answer involves religion, labor movements, Jewish immigration, industrial factories, Henry Ford, the Great Depression and even a wonderfully convenient tradition known as "Saint Monday."
We'll discover how Saturday afternoon became valuable leisure time, why businesses realized that giving workers time off could actually be good for business, and how the five-day, 40-hour workweek eventually became embedded in American life.
And there's a bigger question.
If we once moved from six working days to five, why did we stop there?
The strange story behind two days of the week that most of us couldn't imagine living without.
Because apparently, there's a reason for almost everything.
You're listening to Wait, why do we do that? The strange stories behind completely normal things. This time, why do we have weekends? Now, to explain the origin of it all, here's your host, Steve.
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Saturday and Sunday, possibly the two most popular words in the English language. Friday afternoon arrives and something changes. People become happier. Emails become less urgent. Someone says, We'll pick that up Monday. Which, translated into normal English, means, I no longer care about this problem. Then suddenly it's Saturday morning. No alarm, no commute. No teams meeting at 8 30 with somebody saying, Can everyone see my screen? It's the weekend. Two days that we collectively decided are somehow different from the other five, and we rarely question it. But think about how strange that actually is. There is absolutely nothing happening astronomically on Saturday morning. The Earth doesn't slow down, the sun doesn't behave differently. Nature has no idea it's the weekend, your dog certainly doesn't. At 6 15 on Saturday morning, your dog remains completely committed to the weekday schedule. We created the weekend, which raises a fairly obvious question. Why two days? Why Saturday and Sunday? And perhaps most importantly, who decided that five days of work followed by only two days off was a fair deal? Because for most workers throughout history, it wasn't. For a long time there simply wasn't a weekend in the way we understand it today. There were religious days of rest. For Christians, Sunday traditionally served that role. But having Sunday off is not the same thing as having a weekend, particularly because Sunday wasn't originally intended to be the day you went to Costco, watched football, and spent three hours wondering why you agreed to assemble something from IKEA. It was a religious day, a day for church. Rest reflection. And depending on where and when you lived, there could be rules about what you were allowed to do. So for many workers, the week looked something like this Monday, work, Tuesday, work, Wednesday, work, Thursday, but work, Friday, work, Saturday, also work, Sunday, church. Then Monday again. Which is quite a difficult schedule to imagine today. Because we've built an enormous amount of modern life around the assumption that Saturday belongs to us. Sports, shopping, kids' activities, home improvement, travel, restaurants, weddings, birthday parties, and the strange weekend ritual, where you spend Saturday doing all the jobs you didn't have time to do during the week, so that you can spend Sunday recovering from your day off. But Saturday wasn't always yours. We had to acquire it. And one of the strangest parts of that story involves something called Saint Monday. Saint Monday was not actually a saint. I feel we should establish that fairly quickly. There is no Saint Monday looking down from heaven thinking, don't worry about work today, you've had a difficult weekend.
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St.
SPEAKER_01
Monday was a custom among some workers in Britain and elsewhere during the 19th century. Sunday was the official day off, and some workers took full advantage of it. They drank, they socialized, they gambled, they enjoyed themselves, and occasionally they enjoyed themselves enough that Monday morning became something of a logistical problem. So they didn't go to work. Saint Monday, essentially the nineteenth century version of calling in sick after Super Bowl Sunday, except they gave it a name. And apparently everybody knew what was happening. Employers, unsurprisingly, weren't huge fans of St. Monday. If you're running a factory, having a significant portion of your workforce spontaneously extend the weekend isn't ideal, especially when, technically, the weekend didn't exist yet, so an interesting compromise began to emerge. What if workers got some time off on Saturday? They could shop, take care of household business, socialise, maybe even have a drink, and in return they would actually come to work on Monday. Saturday afternoon gradually became a half holiday in parts of industrial Britain, which means one of the ancestors of our modern weekend may essentially have been a deal. We'll give you Saturday afternoon, if you promise to stop being hungover on Monday. Human civilization advances in mysterious ways, but something interesting happened once workers started getting Saturday afternoons to themselves. Businesses discovered leisure. Because if thousands of people suddenly have the same afternoon free, they need something to do. Railways could sell excursion tickets, theatres could put on performances, shops could attract customers, and sports had an audience. In Britain, Saturday afternoon became strongly associated with football. Which makes perfect sense. If factories finish around lunchtime and thousands of workers suddenly have several hours available, you now have thousands of potential spectators. So the Saturday afternoon football tradition wasn't simply some random cultural choice. It fit the emerging working week. Work helped create leisure. And then leisure created entire industries. This is going to become important later. Because once businesses realized that free time could also mean spending money, the weekend became economically interesting. But first, America had another problem to solve. For much of 19th century America, Sunday was widely treated as the normal weekly day of rest. That worked reasonably well if you were Christian, but America was changing. Large numbers of Jewish immigrants were entering the workforce. And Judaism observes the Sabbath from Friday evening through Saturday evening, which creates a fairly obvious scheduling problem. Christian workers wanted Sunday off, Jewish workers needed Saturday off. An employer could theoretically say, Fine, everybody gets their own day. Except now different parts of the workforce disappear on different days. And remember, we're talking about factories, production lines, industrial operations, not someone working from home who can move their Tuesday afternoon meeting to Wednesday. For Jewish workers, the situation could be particularly difficult. Observe the Sabbath, or keep your job. In 1908, a New England spinning mill did something unusual. It adopted a five-day schedule. Saturday and Sunday were both off. The mill had a substantial Jewish workforce and management, and Saturday closure allowed observance of the Jewish Sabbath while Sunday remained the conventional Christian day of rest. There was a catch. The existing weekly hours were initially spread across the five working days, so technically a five day week, but perhaps not yet the relaxing weekend we're imagining. Still, the idea mattered. Saturday and Sunday are together. Now we're getting somewhere. Religion helped create the conditions, but workers and unions pushed the idea much further, and their argument was pretty simple. One day wasn't enough. Remember what Sunday was supposed to contain? Rest, religion, family, household chores, personal business, recovery from six days of work, presumably laundry. Although thankfully nobody had invented resetting 17 different online passwords yet. One day had to do everything. Labour organizations increasingly pushed for shorter working weeks, and some industries became particularly important. The clothing trades, which employed many Jewish workers, became an early center of the five-day movement. Tens of thousands of garment workers went on strike during the 1920s over working conditions and shorter hours. By the late 1920s, five-day schedules had become common in collective bargaining agreements in parts of the clothing industry. So once again, the weekend wasn't simply given to people, people fought for it. Which brings us to a man who also appeared in episode one. Henry Ford. Apparently we're going to have to start charging him as a recurring character. In 1926, Ford Motor Company adopted a five-day, 40-hour working week for factory workers. Saturday off, Sunday off, same weekly pay. This was a big deal. Ford was one of the most famous industrial companies in the world, and when a company like Ford does something, other businesses pay attention. Now you might imagine Henry Ford sitting in his office thinking, My workers have been working extremely hard, they deserve more time with their families. And there was some of that. Ford publicly talked about rest and recreation, but Henry Ford also understood something extremely important. You can't sell things to people who never have time to use them. Think about that. Ford makes cars. What do people do when they have free time? They go places. How do they get there? Well, Henry has an idea. Ford explicitly connected leisure with consumption. More free time meant people could travel, shop, eat out, buy clothes, spend money, and yes, drive cars. It turns out the weekend isn't necessarily the enemy of capitalism. It might be one of its greatest inventions. Give people money, then give them enough time off to spend it. It's difficult not to admire the efficiency of the arrangement. Your employer pays you on Friday, and by Sunday evening the economy would very much like it back. Then came the Great Depression, and suddenly the argument for shorter working weeks changed again. Millions of people were unemployed. Now there was another reason to reduce working hours. If one person works sixty hours, that's sixty hours of work concentrated in one job. But if working hours are reduced, perhaps available work can be spread among more people. Work sharing became part of the economic debate. Then, in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act established federal rules covering wages and overtime for many American workers. Initially, its overtime threshold was 44 hours, then 42, and finally in 1940, 40 hours. As we discussed in episode one, the law didn't simply ban working beyond 40 hours, but for covered workers, overtime became more expensive, and that helped make the five-day, forty-hour week increasingly normal. Monday through Friday, Saturday and Sunday off, the modern American weekend had arrived, not because somebody sat down and designed the perfect week, but because religion, labor movements, industrial production, economics, consumerism, and government regulation gradually collided, and somehow produced Saturday morning. And once the weekend existed, we went all in. Saturday became shopping day, sports day, home improvement day, kids' soccer day, car washing day, wedding day, road trip day, the day where millions of people simultaneously decide that what they really need to do is visit Home Depot. Sunday developed its own personality. Brunch, football, family lunch, church, yard work, and at some point around late Sunday afternoon, a very specific feeling. You know the one, you were perfectly happy at 2.30. Then it's 547. And suddenly your brain says tomorrow is Monday. The Sunday scaries. We invented two days of freedom, and then allowed Monday to start ruining the second one before it was even over. That's impressive. But the really interesting thing is how deeply we've designed society around these two days. Schools, banks, financial markets, government offices, television schedules, sports leagues, retail, travel, entertainment. Everything knows when the weekend is. Hotels charge differently for it. Airlines price around it, restaurant staff around it, highways become congested around it. We didn't just create the weekend when we built an economy around it. Which brings us to the uncomfortable question. Why did we stop at two? We moved from essentially no weekend to Sunday to Saturday afternoon, and Sunday to Saturday and Sunday, and then apparently everyone looked at the calendar and said, perfect, never touch it again. But now we're starting to ask the question again. Four-day work weeks are being tested. Some companies use compressed schedules. Remote and hybrid work have blurred the distinction between working time and personal time. And technology keeps changing how much we can accomplish, which creates an interesting parallel with the past. A century ago people asked, do we really need to work six days? Today we're asking, do we really need to work five? And if history tells us anything, the answer isn't determined entirely by productivity. It's determined by culture, economics, technology, worker expectations, and what businesses believe they can realistically change. Maybe 50 years from now, someone will listen to a podcast about the five-day work week and say, wait, people only had two days off? And then they'll return to their three-day weekend. Or they'll work seven days a week for an artificial intelligence company. Could go either way. So, why do we have weekends? Nobody invented them in a single moment. Sunday came largely from religious tradition. Saturday emerged gradually through labor pressure, changing social habits, and the practical problem of different religious Sabbaths. Workers fought for shorter weeks. Businesses discovered that leisure could improve productivity and create customers. Henry Ford helped prove that one of America's biggest industrial companies could operate on a five-day schedule. And federal overtime rules eventually helped to make 40 hours the American standard. The weekend wasn't inevitable. It was negotiated, fought over, experimented with, and eventually normalized. Which means the next time Friday afternoon arrives and someone says, We'll deal with that Monday. You are participating in the end result of more than a century of social and economic change. Although I probably wouldn't explain all of that to them. Just say, Sounds good. Close the laptop and enjoy your weekend. I'm Steve. And apparently there's a reason for almost everything. Even if it isn't a particularly good one.
