US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/30/us-small-business-office-workers-gene-marks

by rntn • 3 years ago

98 118 3 years ago

user6723• 3 years ago

There are other ways to get on the internet than a crowded "open office floor plan" where you're smelling each others' farts all day and have to remind people to message you on Slack instead of walking across the room to tap you on the shoulder when you already have headphones on.

softwaredoug5• 3 years ago

It’s weird going to downtown SF these days.

Everyone seems from out of town. Or if they live nearby, just downtown for their teams onsite.

It’s like a decrepit city district that exists for the sole purpose of flying people in to meet in person. Less a thriving center for tech. More a default place for leadership to get everyone together.

Obviously the vicious cycle of nimbyism, lack of affordability, and homelessness only continue a downward spiral that existed pre pandemic. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of original thinking on a solution other than “get people back to offices” from those that CAN afford to live nearby and pretend the world hasn’t changed.

latchkey16• 3 years ago

SF should have turned some of that office space into more affordable housing long ago. This would have created a community. The Castro is cool, because people live there. There is a little central downtown area and then it is surrounded by housing. Downtown SF is completely devoid of that.

Animats3• 3 years ago

exists for the sole purpose of flying people in to meet in person. Less a thriving center for tech. More a default place for leadership to get everyone together.

Right. In which case you may as well meet at an airport hotel with good meeting rooms.

Maybe there is a market for that. Repurpose under-utilized indoor malls as business conference centers where teams meet once or twice a week. Malls have plenty of space, plenty of parking, good HVAC, food facilities, and some shopping. All you need to make an unused store into a meeting space is furniture.

leetrout• 3 years ago

A few malls are trying this.

I called my local mall to use their little event space (think 60 folding chairs and a podium in a 900 sqft box). No call back.

I am continually surprised at how hard it is to find a place to hold a small meetup in the evenings

conductr• 3 years ago

My teams use small hotels for this. Doesn’t have to be a convention center hotel but most hotels you can rent a meeting space. Out of town guests just need to walk up to their rooms when meetings adjourn. But likely we’ll be hosting a team dinner too somewhere in the vicinity

deanCommie• 3 years ago

In which case you may as well meet at an airport hotel with good meeting rooms.

I'm not finding in-office work productive for the in-office meetings. Those are just as productive remotely.

It's for the hallway conversations, for pair-programming at someone's desks, for grabbing lunch with another senior technical leader on another team and finding out what they're up to, and bonding such that the next time we need to integrate we are automatically looking to fast-track helping each other out.

This requires a sense of place, comfortable vibes, and a pleasant lunch location with good food.

Call me spoiled, but an airport hotel and a buffet table just won't cut it.

Our industry's problem is that the low-EQ engineers have no interest in any of the human elements that make teams and organizations productive. And the only ones around with high-EQ are the VC's who are blinded by the dollars and cents of it all.

So noone REALLY has a vested interest in understanding what we lost when we went all remote during COVID, and what are the minimal elements from it required that are needed to be brought back.

otoburb• 3 years ago

>Right. In which case you may as well meet at an airport hotel with good meeting rooms.

Japan Airlines recently launched a "rent clothes" offering for overseas travelers.[1] This would dovetail nicely with your idea of meeting at an airport hotel with great conference rooms.

[1] https://press.jal.co.jp/en/release/202307/007481.html

ransom1538• 3 years ago

I lived in SF for 15 years. The apartment prices are still insane (for a non violent neighborhood). I hope the entire place collapses, so you can get a run down 2 bedroom for 2k. Like it should be. Let artists start moving back in.

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san-francisco-large-t...

soupfordummies• 3 years ago

It’s crazy that now entire neighborhoods of skyscrapers are basically just glorified “wework” spaces now

TeffenEllis• 3 years ago

I’ve been a remote engineer for over a decade, but only recently switched to a hybrid schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays. IMO, these two days are effectively useless for any kind of productive technical work. There are simply too many visual distractions, interruptions, and a complete lack of comfort in an office.

…But I do enjoy these in-office days for what they make up for in remote work: Face to face chats; Real time human bonding; A sense of place. The office is just a socially accepted excuse to get everyone out of their homes and together for a few hours.

I’m especially grateful that our cofounders understand why we should actually be at the office, and that any expectation of “being more productive” is nothing more but a polite fiction. Ironically, our two days in the office are mostly spent just outside the building. Technical chats over lunch, 1 on 1 meetings as a walk around the neighborhood, and drinks in the evening. That’s what hybrid should be. I’ll send my pull requests at 3 am while in my comfy chair at home.

As for the commercial real estate market, I truly believe they’re fucked in the long run. There aren’t enough jobs like my Montessori arrangement that justify all the buildings in their portfolio. Hell, we couldn’t even go back to full-office because our team is so distributed!

Personally, I think this is commodification coming back to bite short-term economics applied to financial districts. We don’t need a Chipotle on every corner. We don’t need another $20 box salad store.

We need neighborhoods that people want to be in for reasons other than work!

I’m guessing that in the coming months there’s gonna be talks of a real estate bailout. Investors have entwined their holdings into everyone’s retirement plans, and will no doubt appear on the nightly news wearing a vest made out of dynamite. They will threaten to take us all down with them.

Such a shame that they’ve over-leveraged their position. Did they forget that we already have nothing to lose? The irony will be lost on them.

latchkey16• 3 years ago

We don’t need a Chipotle on every corner. We don’t need another $20 box salad store.

These are the only types of business that can afford the rents though. Even if you get another lower cost place in there, they have to cut corners on quality and end up going out of business or just being really bad food. How do you overcome that?

lotsofpulp3• 3 years ago

Lower the rent.

EMM_386• 3 years ago

How do you overcome that?

It will lower itself naturally.

Less people in office buildings means less foot traffic to stores, which means less fewer stores will be enticed to rent.

If nobody's renting, eventually the owners and investors will have to realize some rent is better than no rent, even if it means they are going to take a loss.

Then rents start dropping back to earth.

tpmoney• 3 years ago

…But I do enjoy these in-office days for what they make up for in remote work: Face to face chats; Real time human bonding; A sense of place. The office is just a socially accepted excuse to get everyone out of their homes and together for a >few hours. >I’m especially grateful that our cofounders understand why we should actually be at the office, and that any expectation of “being more productive” is nothing more but a polite fiction. Ironically, our two days in the office are mostly spent just outside the building. Technical chats over lunch, 1 on 1 meetings as a walk around the neighborhood, and drinks in the evening. That’s what hybrid should be. I’ll send my pull requests at 3 am while in my comfy chair at home.

I feel like these sorts of things are part of "being more productive" though. Having a good rapport with your co-workers, having a chance to talk about side things, having a chance for people whose domains don't normally cross to hear what's going on elsewhere. These are all parts of being a well functioning and productive team. It's a real shame that larger organizations tend to lose sight of that, but it's also a shame in my opinion that this whole fight over remote vs in office work has gotten the workers pretending that nothing but the numbers matter. This really feels like a "be careful what you wish for" moment.

klodolph• 3 years ago

I feel like these sorts of things are part of "being more productive" though.

Yeah.

There are some things which can be more difficult when you’re remote. Working through a design—it’s so much better when you have two people in a room with a whiteboard or paper. Onboarding. Going through a gnarly code review (where you really want some major changes to the code before it gets shipped). Debriefing after a meeting, where you and your teammate know that the meeting was a complete waste of time, but you need a chance to kvetch about it offline and off the record.

phpisthebest5• 3 years ago

>But I do enjoy these in-office days for what they make up for in remote work: Face to face chats; Real time human bonding; A sense of place.

Every-time I am in the office I remember a scene from the west wing where the quote is "He thinks decisions are made in meetings...." expressing that most decisions are made in informal discussions in hallways, or impromptu mini-meetings standing in someones office door. Meetings are where we tell everyone the decisions that were already made

It is hard to replicate that in a remote work environment, maybe that is better I dont know, but for I see the advantage of both

tetha• 3 years ago

I’ve been a remote engineer for over a decade, but only recently switched to a hybrid schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays. IMO, these two days are effectively useless for any kind of productive technical work. There are simply too many visual distractions, interruptions, and a complete lack of comfort in an office. …But I do enjoy these in-office days for what they make up for in remote work: Face to face chats; Real time human bonding; A sense of place. The office is just a socially accepted excuse to get everyone out of their homes and together for a few hours.

This is why we've switched to a full week every month, which amounts to 1 - 1.2 days per week of presence. This week is used for planning, discussions, more complex knowledge sharing. We've just found it more effective to plan some things with post-its and a whiteboard. Sure, things like Miro exist, but if you combine the friction from the wonderful video call solution teams, miro, microphones, internet uplinks and such, it becomes a real distraction.

But yeah, during these weeks, we don't do much technical work beyond keeping the lights on and pushing the simple service requests through the queue.

CharlieDigital• 3 years ago

When I ran a remote team on the opposite coast, I'd visit once every 3-4 weeks for a week at a time.

While we'd spend time working, we'd also plan things like field trips (hiking, kayaking, museum visits), we'd go out and get lunch and dinner, bring our Switch consoles and have Mario Kart tournaments in the conference room, and other things like celebrating birthdays, births, anniversaries, and so on.

For remote teams, using the together time to focus on productivity and work is a broken model. Glad that your founders get it!

gochi• 3 years ago

We need neighborhoods that people want to be in for reasons other than work!

Every other reason eventually boils down to this very point.

Turns out, specialized districts were a massive city planning mistake.

jnwatson• 3 years ago

Dunno. I don’t need a cement plant on my block.

gmadsen• 3 years ago

I'd say it's productive it the sense that creating in person relationships has a direct effect on getting things done that require large amounts of people.

rwmj• 3 years ago

Hell, we couldn’t even go back to full-office because our team is so distributed!

Isn't this a problem even for coming into the office 2 days a week?

My experience is that I work on a team which is really distributed. We have people in nearly every continent (including Africa and South America, but not Antarctica), so getting to an office 2 days a week is not an option. We have regular video conferences though.

gumby• 3 years ago

I’m especially grateful that our cofounders understand why we should actually be at the office, and that any expectation of “being more productive” is nothing more but a polite fiction.

I presume the interactions and such you describe increase your net productivity, much as taking the time to study something does. Neither show up directly in Taylorist metrics like “PRs closed”

eek2121• 3 years ago

Our company does regular meetups throughout the year. No need for a hybrid schedule really. We are all located throughout the US. The company pays for all expenses for those that choose to visit on site. This is without limits or restrictions. It STILL costs them less than maintaining a large office in a popular metro area. I see my coworkers a total of maybe 4x a year. We also have regular 'shoot the shit' Zoom meets. That is honestly enough interaction for me.

As an autistic person with ADHD, office environments are 'difficult' to say the least. Thankfully I've been fully remote for about a decade as well. Wouldn't go back, and thankfully I don't need to. There are plenty of remote jobs available and I don't see that changing short of some type of short-sighted government regulation.

Smaller companies have realized that office space and the infrastructure to support it is a huge money sink compared to just having employees work from home.

andrei_says_2• 3 years ago

Not being forced into an office n times per week has allowed me to work from different parts of the country including Hawaii for over a month. This beats face to face small talk and $25 food court lunches beyond measure.

I make sure to socialize on zoom in every call, my focus is through the roof as well as my productivity.

amerkhalid• 3 years ago

I’m especially grateful that our cofounders understand why we should actually be at the office, and that any expectation of “being more productive” is nothing more but a polite fiction.

They sound like great leaders. I also work for a great company which is very pro-remote work.

I have been working from home for several years before pandemic. I lived near office, so every once in awhile I would go in to take a break from programming and socialize. It is great for those purposes especially once you are out of college, it is really hard to make new friends. And this is the one aspect about office work that I miss. But it is not a company's job to provide friends.

Also I realized people who lacked real skills but were good at socializing were the ones who went to office often and they were the ones who were climbing corporate ladders faster.

And I have tried hard to understand why return to office is good for business but don’t see any point. Only explanation that makes sense to me is that people who are good at politics are having hard time playing politics in remote world. They have no other skills, technical or business. But they have already climbed corporate ladder and feeling powerless. Now they need people in offices for their personal benefits, not for company’s.

zeroCalories2• 3 years ago

I think one thing people aren't considering is how remote work makes people more easily substitutable. Why live in SF if you can live in a small Colorado town? Why pay for a remote developer in SF when you could pay for a remote developer in Arizona? Why hire in the U.S when you can get a good dev in South America? There used to be a geographic monopoly on labor, but making remote the norm moves us away from that.

Maybe that's a good thing, as it will make NYC affordable, but NYC is also experiencing huge budget shortages from the drop in land value. I suspect these will only get worse over time in all major U.S cities.

tekla• 3 years ago

This is what programmers wanted right? The right to work from wherever they wanted. Except, that includes cheap areas where salary requirements tend to be much lower and pushes down wages.

Tade0• 3 years ago

As someone hailing from a popular outsourcing destination, the lower the costs of living in a location, the higher IT salaries are in comparison to the median.

I moved to a smaller (population 600k vs 1.7mln) city and my salary didn't change much working remotely, while costs, especially real estate, are approximately 30% lower.

All my friends who stayed there did so simply because they had someone to finance their housing.

HWR_143• 3 years ago

Not everyone. I'm smart enough to want to limit my competition.

softwaredoug5• 3 years ago

To some degree yes,

However living in the same city is only one aspect of substitutability.

There’s also specialized skills, organizational tenure, time zone, how easily legally a company can hire in a country, language barrier and many others.

zeroCalories2• 3 years ago

I agree that it's only one aspect, but the other ones you mentioned are becoming less of an issue over time. I'm not worried about my job over the next 5 years, but 10? 20? What about my child's first job?

j45• 3 years ago

It’s why hybrid work might be a better choice for those with competitors globally.

Demanding remote only invites remote talent from anywhere not just for existing employees

sgt101• 3 years ago

Every CEO has, for the last 20 years at least, outsourced and offshored every role that they possibly could.

All the bullshit about co-location and productivity is dropped instantaneously when there is a chance of saving a dime.

The flat out truth is that the off shored teams are either good enough to do the job (they they have the job already, or would have in short order remote or no) or they aren't.

I agree that low cost onshore locations are likely to benefit, and wages will be lower there - this is a good thing for the developed economies though. I am in the UK and there are many cities that have complex and extensive infrastructures that could be a great place to live. These would benefit hugely from even 250 remote working IT people going to the restaurants, sending their kids to the schools, showing up to local events and so on. The IT folks would (and are) benefiting from not sitting on the Tube for 1 1/2 hrs a day and not having to work in the chaos and bullshit of a London office.

The trade off is worth it. London will be ok as it was literally bursting before Covid, I think that about 2x the people will have a job "there" in the long term.... showing up for 1 or 2 days a week and then retreating to the NORTH...

akira2501• 3 years ago

I think one thing people aren't considering is how remote work makes people more easily substitutable.

It depends on the type of business you're in. If you're working for a large multinational that's doing "commodity web" type work, then yes, remote work probably does make you more replaceable. Fortunately this is not the totality of the job market, although, their monopoly status does seem to help make them the majority of it.

ozim• 3 years ago

I don’t agree. There is much more to hiring even across states let alone from a different country.

Mid sized companies don’t really have experience or know how to hire internationally.

Big companies have know how and resources yes but your average Joe CEO is going to be terrified of it as he won’t have control over it and he has already enough stuff to do locally to keep company running and he can hire Elaine as HR and Jeff as manager and they will know how to deal with Ashton and Jimmy who live in the same state so our Joe CEO will have less worries - which in turn translates to less money wasted by company even if some devs would be cheaper on monthly salaries.

softwaredoug5• 3 years ago

A mid sized company doesn’t have experience directly hiring, but plenty of firms make it easy to employ a remote workforce as contractors.

seydor• 3 years ago

Hm ... how about we tax work from home? Like, tax homes for doubling as office space. I think it's a brilliant idea

bcrosby95• 3 years ago

You might be joking but we already tax the extra space you need for work from home because the larger amount of space results in a more expensive home.

ambrose2• 3 years ago

Except I’ve already been in a 1 bedroom apt since before COVID and I’m still stuck working remotely because people don’t want to go into the office.

FpUser• 3 years ago

Stop treating people and business separately. Problem solved. Otherwise get lost. Not your business what I do inside my house.

throwanem• 3 years ago

We already do that. The home office tax deduction used to be available for W2 employees, but it was suspended in 2018 under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Theoretically it's meant to resume in 2025, but I'll be surprised if that actually happens.

evilduck2• 3 years ago

How about employers compensate me for supplying their office space, utilities and cleaning, or let me deduct it as an operating expense on my personal taxes just like the businesses get to do?

renewedrebecca• 3 years ago

How about we tax you for having bad ideas?

JHorse• 3 years ago

Rezone for mixed residential, remodel into loft space.

Done and done.

RyanAdamas• 3 years ago

Ultimately, the money for these projects comes from the government. Major works projects which have revolutionized how we live never begin as private enterprise; those are relegated to products and services with incremental contributions to our advancements.

The USA needs State-based Socialism and not this consumeristic crony capitalism that is killing our humanity in every respect. Global socialism is just other countries stealing from each other and calling it equity. Strong nations are the basis for production and when incentives don't exist to engage people in those nations because of international influence, money, and elitism the outcome is stagnation and degradation of the system.

Real estate speculation has gone absolutely wild over the last sixty years as the Federal Government, the Federal Reserve, and its agents, sit on hundred of millions of acres of livable land, and hundreds of thousands of homes, as a means of maintaining investor value. Which is a complete affront to social government and the purpose of this nation - the ability to choose how we live.

None of us choose this save for the inheritors of massive capital who are generally "citizens of the world" because they are liquid enough to owe no loyalties. This has to end.

Animats3• 3 years ago

Business owners are adapting just fine. Commercial real estate owners are in big trouble.[1] That article says that most office real estate is leased for five years with an option to renew. Many of those renewals are not happening.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimscheinberg/2023/07/26/dont-l...

dageshi• 3 years ago

It might ultimately be the banks who are in trouble.

"For an office landlord, abandoning a building can be the best of bad options. Commercial mortgages on offices are usually structured as “nonrecourse” loans, which means that only the building is forfeited in a default. "

https://www.curbed.com/article/nyc-office-real-estate-rechle...

This is a great article on the situation in New York, I highly recommend it.

Animats3• 3 years ago

It might ultimately be the banks who are in trouble.

Commercial real estate landlords keep saying that, in hopes of a bailout. Whether it's a real problem for banks remains to be seen. It's a slow problem, and banks can generally deal with slow problems.

BenFranklin1002• 3 years ago

They neglect one of the biggest ways we can revitalize downtown areas: build lots of new homes on underdeveloped properties. Not only will this drive demand for downtown office space, it will provide foot traffic for small businesses. It also shortens commutes and is good for the environment.

errantmind• 3 years ago

This depends on other conditions being good as well, like being bike/pedestrian friendly and reasonably safe. There's no amount of new homes they could build that would revitalize Houston's downtown because it sucks. Most of the people I know who live and work inside the loop go out of their way to avoid downtown. I live adjacent to downtown and haven't been there for anything, including events, for years.

BenFranklin1002• 3 years ago

A reason downtown Houston may “suck” is because there are too few homes and thus it becomes a wasteland on the weekends and evenings. Mixed use districts with high density of residential will draw in stores, nightlife venues, and restaurants. It will also drive demand for bike and mass transit.

Moreover, there are many urban downtowns that don’t “suck’, such as Boston and NYC that are still facing a challenging commercial real estate market. Additional residential in this metros will be quickly snapped up and drive demand for nearby offices.

samhuk• 3 years ago

Been almost solely a remote software engineer for ~5 years.

The last couple of offices I've seen just have terrible equipment. This of course could just be my own anecdotal coincidental experience or just me being picky, but I do wonder if it's actually, at least in part, due to companies just not giving two sh*ts about equipment because fewer and fewer workers are actually going into the office.

If that hypothesis is true, then it's a really vicious and rapid positive feedback doom-spiral: worse equipment -> fewer on-site workers -> less motivation for better equipment -> even worse equipment -> even fewer on-site -workers...

...repeat ad nauseam.

Also, slightly tin-foil-hat-like (however I bet many will relate), but in the country I'm currently living in (UK), the government sold off all of the transport services to private soulless demons and political cronies, causing a runaway price surge that means a yearly pass for one ~30 minute route is >£5,000 (around $6,000?).

So, yeah, each on-site for me equals getting scammed by profiteering demons, having my back eviscerated by the knock-off-of-a-knock-off of a Herman Miller that has foam crushed into a slab of diamond, spending 30 minutes finding a HDMI/whatever cable, and of course losing 1-2 hours of my life to transport there and back.

Nah.

EDIT: What would make on-site a viable possibility for me would just be: Nicer transport (e.g. >70% chance of seat, instead of 1E-300% chance at the moment), cheaper transport, and better equipment.

EDIT2: I forgot biggest on-site downside of them all: bad tea and coffee :P

tschellenbach• 3 years ago

There's a big gap in these trends between SF & everywhere else. - For companies in SF, rents are extremely high, local salaries are super high and the city is in bad shape so nobody wants to go there. - In most other places rents are affordable, local and remote salaries are similar, and cities are pleasant

SF office space is going to get crushed. Most other places will partially recover.

softwaredoug5• 3 years ago

Affordability, nimbyism, and chronic homelessness occur in a lot more places than SF. Yes SF is kind of the poster child, but these are issues in a lot of places

My small, east coast college town has a YIMBY oriented movement for more affordable living options.

https://livablecville.org/

(and a homeless problem https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/newsletter/the-number-of-peop...)

Our zoning is stuck in some old NIMBY ideals and is really hard to change. Development of new projects is stalled. Housing is more expensive than ever.

Shelter workers say there are many reasons more people might be seeking shelter this year. One is that inflation is making it difficult for people who earn low incomes to afford their homes.

YetAnotherNick• 3 years ago

Everybody is talking about office spaces being empty, but at least in my area the office rent is at all time high which doesn't seem to hint people are using office less(unless office has been repurposed to something else which I don't know about).

jlokier• 3 years ago

In my town, most office rents are all time high and there are a lot of empty units, at the same itme. It's been like this for years, even before Covid.

However, in the few years before Covid there were more spaces advertised than there are now, and that number went up a little in 2020. But now, there's not much on the local the market, even tbough I can see plenty of empty buildings when I walk around.

We have a lot of landlords here who, I'm told, don't care that much about the rent, which is also why they don't try particularly hard to entice tenants. It can be remarkably hard to rent a space even when it's been empty for years and advertised as available, as the agents come up with all sorts of reasons and incompetencies. I am part of an organisation that tried to rent a business unit that was advertised and which we'd been enthusiastically shown around, and after a year of trying we gave up on it because we just couldn't get sane responses from the agent. The unit was still empty when we gave up on it.

There are quite a few that are not advertised but have been empty for years. Some of those are actually available, but you have to talk with property agents and ask for the lists of properties they have on file which are available if you really want to pursue them, but are not advertised. If you don't know, you don't know.

I currently rent a small office in a larger office building. The rent I'm paying is relatively low for the area, but it's inching up citing "market rates", i.e. high, even though most of the units in the building how now been empty for multiple years.

The property agent told me my particular landlord doesn't really care about the rent as they have other long-term plans for the building. So it's disappointing they still charge as much as they do for that rent they don't really care about. I'd love to take the empty unit next door to expand my office; it's likely to remain empty for another year anyway.

I was told a few years ago, before Covid, this dynamic is for two reasons. (1) The big landlords often prefer to hold out for a large, higher-paying tenant with a long lease, even if it means no rent for a year or two by turning down lower-paying tenants meanwhile. This makes little sense to me as they could presumably offer flexible terms where they can give notice at any time, but hey I'm not a landlord. And (2) some of them intend to wait for the building to be empty for long enough (20 years) that they eventually obtain automatic permission to demolish the building and replace it with a new build, either apartments or a new building with more floors and maximum footprint. I don't know if either of these reasons are true.

vr462• 3 years ago

About three or four years ago, I asked the owners of a closed-down department store if we could turn a big chunk of the 4-5 storey section into a climbing wall and was told to F-off as they had bigger plans for a new commercial centre with mixed-work and retail.

Anyway, it’s still shuttered, so good luck with that plan.

bombcar7• 3 years ago

They do not want to deviate from the standard because it might possibly threaten something, so they're very conservative.

Find one that's willing to have a Spirit Halloween store in it and you might find them more receptive.

vr462• 3 years ago

They’re avaricious bastards, it’s what they are. Huge, vast amounts of money flows through businesses and straight to landlords in London, strangling investment in small businesses, their employees and the wider economy. Businesses with high margins, low inventory and low unskilled staffing costs win.

In Germany, I note that thousands of small businesses flourish that vanished from London’s streets - I have a choice of places to have a kitchen knife sharpened, for example - and while London holds vast opportunity, I fear that its breadth is severely constricted and whole areas of industry, skills and expertise are effectively extinct as the startup Capex is too high, and the Opex is vampiric.

cududa• 3 years ago

In my city, an office building was converted to an apartment. The windows don’t open, given it’s an old apartment building.

The AC has been out for two weeks. Not at all saying we should let office buildings stay vacant, just, never considered how much it would suck to not be able to open windows.

https://fox8.com/news/unbearable-residents-in-lakewood-high-...

softwaredoug5• 3 years ago

Are we the baddies?

unfortunately modern HVAC systems work off a computer motherboard. Apparently, through zero fault of ours, that motherboard was fried by an electrical surge.

bombcar7• 3 years ago

Often the computer is just to make it more efficient, it should be designed to have a low-efficiency backup control mechanism that is simply "on/off" on a basic mercury thermostat.

birdyrooster• 3 years ago

My company thought it would be cute to have us return to cubicles instead of our old offices. It's terrible, now I have nowhere good to work at home or in the office. I suppose my poor performance was part of their calculations of value.

US offices are sitting empty – business owners will have to adapt

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