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If you fly to Madrid and look at your phone you're still going to need that massive table of local custom by region, or you're going to be utterly baffled when most shops start closing at 13:30 and then reopen in early evening, and the restaurants are all closed at 18:00.

There's no shortage of international differences in opening hours, days and times and time-zones don't really get you very far towards understanding them.

But I would have to know that about Madrid either way. It would at least help to know when those times are relative to the local day cycle.

Time zones give me a few bits of information and knowing about local customs gives me the other bits, but the bits that are encoded in the time zone are bits I can ignore as soon as I change my clock, just as setting your zero helps you work out a physics problem. Instead you want me to worry about all the bits all the time. Why, to make it easier for computers? I thought computers were better than me at handling bits.

"If I fly to London and look at my phone (which compensates for time zones) and it says it's 1300, I figure it will be similar to 1300 at home in many ways: late but not too late for lunch, during normal working hours, and most everything is probably open."

Realize that you're on HN, where I've heard long arguments about why your laptop and/or phone should not adjust the timezone of the device based on location. People who argue with a straight face that "the vast majority of people want their laptop to display their home time when abroad".

It's rare that you have transatlantic meetings, but you fly abroad so often that you can't keep track of when the shops open? (your phone could compensate for that). Do you also flip the fuck out when you fly to Australia and it's goddamn Summer in January?