A case study evaluates the economics of installing a staged evaporative cooling system in a factory in the southeastern USA. The effective temperature at the plant floor is predicted for each working hour from typical meteorological year data. The analysis accounts for internal loads and moisture evaporated by the manufacturing process. Worker productivity is estimated from the effective temperature. Several building loads and evaporative cooling system designs are considered. The results show that evaporative air conditioning can improve worker productivity and profit margins in manufacturing facilities that have high internal loads, high ventilation requirements, or other plant-specific conditions that would make conventional air conditioning uneconomical.