It’s True: Everybody Is On Vacation And If You’re Working, The Question Is ‘Why?’

Sallie Floyd is not at work.

Instead, she is visiting Sacramento with her husband, Ed, and 10-year-old son, Jason. On a sunny Monday morning that’s getting warmer by the minute, they’re seeing the sights of Old Sacramento before heading up to the Gold Country and then on to visit family friends in Reno.

“It’s heaven!” she responds when asked about her family’s vacation. “We’ve only been gone since yesterday, and it feels like a week. It’s so great to get away.”

When she’s at work, Floyd, 39, is a bookkeeper for a small insurance firm in Wausau, Wis. But they’re just having to do without her for a couple of weeks.

“Oh, they’ll miss me, I guess,” she says. “But it’s a slow time for us now, anyway.”

She tilts her head back and lets the hot Sacramento sun warm her face. When she speaks, it’s a declaration: “I feel no guilt whatsoever.”

Those who call for Floyd will just have to call back. Or leave a message. No one can be expected to work all year.

And no one is. It’s vacation season, the peak of which is late July and early August. Anyone phoning around, for whatever reason, is almost as likely to get an answering machine as the person they were calling.

It’s not as pronounced a lull as it is in August in France, where the entire country goes on vacation. But with the summer blockbusters already looking blase and TV long into reruns, this is a good time to get away.

It’s also the most practical time for many people. Although an increasing number of schools are adopting year-round schedules, early August is still the best time for many families with school-age children to get away.

And they do. Andrew Wachlis, a Sacramento-based free-lance telemarketer who hires his services to different businesses, says he gets more answering machines around this time of year than at any other.

“Sometimes, it’s just ridiculous,” he says. “No one’s home. I mean, rejection is the name of the game in my business, but at this time of year, you don’t even get that far.

“On the other hand,” he adds, “It’s not as much work. But sometimes I start feeling like I should take my vacation now, as well.”

But that’s anecdotal evidence. To get some statistical support for the argument that people are harder to reach during the summer, one’s best bet would seem to be to call the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C.

The spokeswoman for the Bureau of Labor Statistics would be happy to talk to us. But she’s on vacation. She’ll be back Monday.

Another employee at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who says she isn’t able to give her name because she isn’t “official,” lowers her voice when she speaks into the phone to offer her anecdotal impressions.

“Nothing gets done around here in August,” she says of the nation’s humid capital. “Even if you are crazy enough to stay in town, it’s too hot to do any work. They ought to just shut the whole thing down.”

Some retailers might share the same view. Susan Tiesing is owner of Bloomingdeals, a store specializing in “upscale resales” of women’s clothing. She says the late July-early August dip has been a perennial in her four years in business.

“We notice it every year, then we forget it. Business gets going along great, and, then, boom! Where are all the people? Whatever they’re doing, they’re not here. We always notice it at the end of July going into August.”

And, she adds, “It doesn’t have to do with the weather. We had a couple of triple digit weeks in June - it was really hot - and that didn’t keep ‘em away. Most people really do have to take their vacation at very particular times.”

Bill Dombrowski is a spokesman for the California Retailers Association in Sacramento. He would be able to offer us an overview of the retail scene in California, but he’s not in right now. “I will be out of the office on vacation,” his answering machine says.

On the other hand, Pam Rucker is in her Washington, D.C., office. A vice president of public relations at the National Retail Federation, Rucker has some statistics that shed a bit of light on the seasonal lull that we, and many of her federation members, are experiencing.

“Some particular products do take a dip in the summer months because people aren’t at home to spend money on things like food and clothing,” Rucker explains. “Department stores, women’s clothing stores dip a bit.

“People do their summer shopping in June (when there’s a small increase) and then stop spending in July,” she says, “In July, there’s a dip of one-half to 1 percent, and it’s nearly across the board.”

A half a percent seems like a small dip. But retail is a $2.5 trillion business, and total sales for conventional department stores are about $54 billion a month. Half a percent of that is about $270 million in one month. That’s a pretty significant lull.

But the lull doesn’t last long.

“It comes back in late August, with all the back-to-school shopping,” Rucker says. “Shoes, for instance, jump nearly 2 percent in August, and family clothing stores see a jump.”

But, she adds, even though they’re not spending money at businesses around their homes, summer vacationers are spending money “in other places - at hotels, restaurants, on airfare, gasoline. The money still gets spent.”

Chuck Ross is spending his money at home this August. He works for a Tennessee-based company, Smith Travel Research, which keeps statistics on hotel occupancy rates.

He says the July-August peak is reflected in those occupancy rates. The percentage of occupied rooms rises steadily through the spring and peaks in July (73.9 percent) and August (75 percent). Then it drops to 67 percent in September and on down until December, which sees a 49.5 percent occupancy rate.

So summer is still the time most people choose to escape.

“There is a trend for people to take shorter but more frequent vacations, which is characteristic of the two-income family,” says Ross on the phone from Nashville. “So people take more extended weekends or short-week vacations. But families still travel in the summer time; the vacations aren’t as long as they used to be.

“And the window for vacations really is when school is out,” he says. “You’ve only got a 60-day window when there’s no school interference. And even that’s getting smaller because of year-round schooling.”

This trend will continue, says Julianne Broyles, spokeswoman for the California Chamber of Commerce in Sacramento. She watches vacation trends for the more than 200,000 businesses around the state that the chamber represents.

“The summer months are still the time,” says Broyles, “But year-round school is changing that because the distribution of vacation hours is not so concentrated at the end of July and August. People are off throughout the year, depending on which time your child is off school.”

Back in Old Sacramento, Jimmy Tanaka, an American-born resident of Osaka, Japan, is enjoying his vacation from work as a corporate attorney. It took him a month of 70-hour weeks to get the work done that would allow him to escape to the States for three weeks. Now that he’s here, he’s not thinking about work.

Not much, anyway.

“I have had a couple of twinges of guilt about work things that - well, they got done, but I’m not sure that everything will work the way it was set up to work,” he says. “But, hey, I did what I could, and I certainly earned my time. If someone needs me, I’ll be back in nine days - no, eight days - and we can deal with it then.”