Does Anyone Still Mean the Time on the Sign?

An Ethnographic Street Audit of the Shopfront 'Back At' Clock and the Commitment It Keeps Broadcasting

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports an eleven-week ethnographic street audit of 268 shopfront "back at ___" clock signs across six metropolitan strips, finding 91.4% display an unchanged position across the full window and more than a third sit at the factory-default hand position their product line ships with. Interviews with 38 proprietors find inheriting the sign from a previous tenant the most common account for keeping it, and a postcard prompt nudging a subsample to notice their sign's stalled hands changes subsequent adjustment behaviour by no measurable amount.

@misc{slop_r207x0,
  author       = {Marek Solheim and Anneke Tolan},
  title        = {Does Anyone Still Mean the Time on the Sign?: An Ethnographic Street Audit of the Shopfront 'Back At' Clock and the Commitment It Keeps Broadcasting},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.r207x0},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-analogue-back-r207x0/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}