The whole thing is predicated on the fact that the government has the right to force everyone to change their clocks on the same day. The government does not have the right to force businesses to change their opening hours. And if each business was free to do as it wanted when it wanted, or not, much extra chaos and consternation would result.
Imagine the fun when Moms’ job changes by an hour this weekend, 3 weeks later Dad’s does, but the elementary school their youngest attends doesn’t at all and the private middle school their middle kid attends likes changing by a half hour, but using different dates altogether.
Ultimately DST got started as a wartime sacrifice where everyone was already in the mindset of following government orders. I expect that if DST had never been invented, but was being first proposed more recently, it would be voted down 420-15 if proposed in 2010 America, and in 2023 (Republican caucus dysfunction notwithstanding) it would simply trigger a revolution.
The jokes about the extra hour of sunlight fading the curtains (I’m assuming these are universal, not just an Australian local thing) and claims it stops the cows giving milk would become repurposed FACTS with Fox News hammering the government being in the pocket of Big Taffeta.
The database files used to describe timezones used by the TZInfo system - also describe daylight saving time. They are an interesting treasure trove of information, as the text files contain a history of submissions adding to the body of knowledge. This includes snippets of email contributions which themselves sometimes contain gems of both knowledge and local history. The source can be found here. Although the Unix time epoch is 1st Jan 1970, the tz database allows time handling libraries to handle times earlier than this, and significant effort has been made to capture as much information as possible to allow historically accurate local times to be managed.
I can’t go past this gem. (Queensland is the Australian equivalent of the more Southern US states in some ways. They mosty don’t do daylight savings time. Given the entire state is lower then 29º, and runs to 10.5º, I can’t blame them.)
Long before DST people were used to following orders when it came to setting and regulating their clocks. Once you have railways and telegraphs you pretty much have to have a common standard for time (and, in larger countries, standard time zones) which will not, except in a very few locations, align with solar time. This happened in the mid (UK) to late (US) nineteenth century.
Yes of course. But that was a very long and gradual process and at each stage of the way showed benefit to the folks and towns which went along. And doubtless there was grumbling from the folks located where the new-fangled “standard time” did not closely match solar time or whatever standard they’d used previously. As mentioned way upthread, a lot of areas in the current US time zones are a poor fit vs. solar time.
But everyone across a whole multi-time zone nation changing clocks on command one fine Sunday twice a year (then suffering the circadian consequences) is a completely different order of magnitude when it comes to raw power by legislative fiat. “Sacrifices must be made for the war effort” is a lot different sell to the general public than is “You do it because we said so. Or Else.”
Changing times was always a problem for long-distance trains. In Canada - until the mid-1960’s, timetables were always shown in Standard Time, so that long-distance (overnight) train schedules appeared the same year round - but the physical arrival of your train would be an hour earlier during DST. Short-distance trains took the hour difference into account physically, so the DST timetables would show them arriving an hour earlier (even if the clock on the wall showed the usual arrival time).
In later years - timetables were changed twice a year, and the DST schedules showed the correct DST times. Long-distance trains slowed or stopped for an hour during the fall changeover, and tried to make up the lost hour in the spring changeover.
ISTR in the U.S., up until at least the mid-60s, that not only were railroad timetables in standard time, but the clocks in railroad stations were also always set to standard time, with a sign underneath the clock that stated that clearly.
A number of years ago, one of the DST shifts was on the same date in Australia and the USA. I used to record a weekly program that was heard here in Chicago late on Saturday and (IIRC) 6 AM Sunday in Australia). When we both shifted DST, there is a 2-hour change in my recording schedule due to our DST shifts being opposite.
What I hadn’t realized was that it was already Sunday in Australia, which had shifted DST and the USA had not shifted DST. The result was there was only one hour difference relative to Australia, and my recording was one hour off, just on that date.
the 1st level divisions that touch to the north coast do not do DST, (including Western Australia, which also reaches to the south coast !) they dont find it so beneficial.,being tropical up there.
the ones that do not touch the north coast, do have DST.
This serves to add the "why " to the OP’s question…
its the temperate areas that benefit more from daylight saving. Tropics don’t, arctic, Antarctic don’t.
The population of Antarctica consists entirely of staff posted to research stations, and the stations usually follow the time zone of the country via which they’re resupplied - it simply makes things easier to coordinate. For instance, the largest settlement on the continent, the McMurdo station (summer population a bit more than 1,000), uses New Zealand time, even though it’s run by the US. New Zealand switches to DST in September, and so does McMurdo.
The southernmost settlement that’s not a research station is the Chilean village of Puerto Toro, and it applies DST, as does Chile as a whole.
I interpret Isilder’s comment to mean that the higher latitudes don’t benefit as much as mid-latitudes from DST, not that they don’t apply it.
I am inclined to agree - I live at 53N and the benefit of the clock change is fairly short-lived. The sun rises at 4am and sets at 10pm in summer, while in winter with 7 hours of daylight it’s dark both on the way to work and on the way home. Only for a scant few weeks is any particular (morning or evening) hour bright that would be dark without the clock change. I suspect if I were living in Helsinki or Tromso the benefit would be felt even more briefly.